MixColors
Mix Colors is a simple tool that generates a linearly interpolated spread of colors. The original colors are included, so Steps = 3 is the minimum (the original two colors, plus one inbetween color)
You can choose which colorspace the blending is done in — linear RGB, HSV, HSV shortest-path, or LAB. HSV shortest-path is different from HSV only in that hue is interpolated along the shortest path — the Hue spectrum is circular, normal HSV interpolation will not travel off one end of it to the other, even if that's the shortest distance. The ColorSliders page provides more info about the difference between these colorspaces, that may help you decide.
You can also choose whether or not to Include Endpoints. Unchecking this avoids duplicating the input colors in the output — with Steps=3, you get one output color (the single intermediate color) per input pair.
This is what the difference looks like:
As you can see, the start/end colors in each blend are omitted when Include endpoints is off.
If you have selected 'tool-specific naming' in the Preferences, the names of the colors generated by Mix Colors will include information about the mixing percentages. (eg. for a 3-step blend with 'include endpoints' off, the only color generated will be named 'COLOR1 50 mix 50 COLOR2')
If you have selected more than two colors, you will see that Gpick produces more than one blend.
In fact, Gpick makes a blend for each selected color with each other selected color. In mathematical terms, this is a subset of a Cartesian product. In this screenshot, there are three input colors, pink, yellow, and red. Let's call them A, B, and C.
In this screenshot, you can see the following blends
- A->B
- A->C
- B->C
These are all the possible non-redundant combinations of input colors.
Gpick can cope with arbitrarily large numbers of input colors; be aware though that the amount of output blends rises quickly as the number of input colors rises.
For example: