Color Patch: Picker & Palette

Point your phone at something and Color Patch reads the color. So do a dozen other
apps. What this one does differently is tell you how much to believe it.

A PATCH, NOT A PIXEL

Every other eyedropper reports a single pixel. A single pixel is the worst possible
reading of a surface: it carries sensor noise, it shares its color with its neighbours
because camera frames store color at half resolution, and above all it cannot tell you
it was the wrong pixel.

Color Patch averages a small square and reports how much the pixels inside it disagreed.
Put the square on a flat wall and it says the reading is even. Put it across an edge, a
shadow or a woodgrain and it says so, instead of handing you the average of two things
as though it were one color.

IT SAYS NO

When there is not enough light, when the highlights are burnt out, or when the square is
clearly over two different things, you do not get a plausible hex code. You get a
refusal and the reason, because a number you cannot trust is worse than no number.

THE LIGHT IS THE HARD PART

A warm kitchen bulb makes a white wall orange before your camera is even involved. Color
Patch lets you lock the exposure and white balance so the reading stops drifting, and
point at a sheet of white paper to measure the color of the light you are standing in.
Everything you read after that is corrected for it.

And when two saved colors were measured under different light, the app says they cannot
fairly be compared — rather than quietly comparing them.

WHAT YOU GET

• Read a color from the camera, or from any picture on your phone
• HEX, RGB and HSL, each copied with one tap
• The nearest named color, with how close it really is
• Palettes: name them, reorder them, keep them
• WCAG 2.1 contrast between any two saved colors, with the AA and AAA verdicts for body
text, large text and interface controls
• A backup file you can save and restore yourself

WHAT IT DOES NOT CLAIM

This is the part most color apps leave out. What a phone gives an app is not a
measurement of a surface — it is the end of a pipeline of automatic white balance,
automatic exposure, a tone curve and compression. It is not the object's color, and this
app says so on every reading rather than in the small print.

So Color Patch does not pretend to match a paint code, and ships no paint brand
database. It is a careful reading of what your camera saw, with its own doubts attached.

YOUR DATA STAYS ON YOUR PHONE

No account. No sign-up. No upload. Every palette lives on your phone and is never copied
to any cloud backup — which is why there is a backup file you control. The app needs the
camera to read a surface in front of you, and that is its only permission of any
consequence; frames are read for their color and thrown away. The internet is used for
one thing only: to load the adverts that pay for the app.

No banner adverts, ever. Nothing takes up permanent room on the screen.

Privacy policy: https://dash-fusion.github.io/privacy/list-color