An intuitive color palette editor built with Avalonia UI. Create, generate, and export beautiful color palettes for your design projects.
Palette management (§1)
- Palette library sidebar: create, inline-rename, duplicate, delete, pin/favorite, search, and filter (All / Pinned / Recent)
- Autosave with dirty state (750 ms debounce), atomic writes, crash-recovery journal, rotating backups, and per-palette version history with one-click restore
- Tabs for open palettes, whole-library import/export, and detach a palette into its own window
Swatch & color editing (§2)
- Full spectrum picker dialog (saturation/value plane + hue & opacity sliders) with HEX / RGB / HSL / HSV input, plus live LAB/LCH/OKLCH readouts
- Manual hex entry, alpha control, copy in 9 formats, paste from clipboard (any notation), swatch labels, duplicate, inline large preview
Color picking (§3)
- System-wide eyedropper with pixel-grid magnifier and global hotkey (default
Ctrl+Alt+P, rebindable) — Windows native interop, fully local - In-app eyedropper for exact pixels of any image, plus histogram-based extraction from images
- Recent-picked-colors history (persisted, click to reuse)
Color science (§4)
- Conversions: HEX, RGB, HSL, HSV, LAB, LCH, OKLCH — live in the inspector
- Harmonies: complementary, analogous, triadic, tetradic, split-complementary, monochromatic + random-with-lock
- Tints / shades / tones generators, palette-from-base, palette-from-image
- WCAG AA/AAA contrast checker and APCA (Lc) verdicts, live for the base color
- Contrast matrix — every text-on-background pair scored at once: color-coded WCAG cells, APCA in the tooltip, one-click CSV copy
- Color blindness simulation (Protanopia, Deuteranopia, Tritanopia, Achromatopsia)
Import / export (§5–6, local files only)
- Import: JSON, CSS variables, GPL (GIMP), ASE (Adobe), ACO (Photoshop), image extraction
- Export: JSON, CSS, SCSS, LESS, Tailwind, SVG, PNG swatch sheet, ASE / GPL / ACO, plain text — copy to clipboard or save to file (the Export workspace holds the presets and preview)
Desktop UX (§7)
- Four workspaces — Studio · Preview · Analyze · Export (
Ctrl+1…4): the top app bar switches the shell so each task only shows the panels it needs, instead of everything at once - Sidebar + resizable/collapsible panels (splitters everywhere), Ctrl+K command palette, full keyboard-shortcut map, tabs, system tray with quick access, multi-window detach, rich tooltips with color info
Preview & visualization (§8)
- Live UI mockup (buttons, cards, body text) rendered in your palette
- Side-by-side comparison with any palette in the library, swatch zoom view, contrast overlay badges (WCAG + APCA) on every card
- Row / Grid / List / Compact view modes, dark/light variant generator
- Swatch cards read as color + name + hex at rest; the per-swatch action rail fades in on hover (lock stays visible)
- Gradient studio — multi-stop linear/radial gradients with a live CSS readout, Copy CSS / Save SVG / Save PNG, and one click to send the stop colors into the palette (undoable)
Storage & settings (§9–10)
- JSON file storage (default) and SQLite storage behind one interface, with migration between them; autosave, backups, version history, whole-library import/export
- Settings: theme, accent color, density, default copy/export formats, hotkey configuration, storage location, reset / clear data
Technical (§11)
- Cross-platform Avalonia UI (.NET 9), MVVM (CommunityToolkit), offline-first (no background network calls; update check runs only when you click it), accessibility labels on swatches, light/dark themes
- xUnit test suite over the color math, WCAG/APCA contrast, copy-format round-trips and every import/export codec (ASE/ACO/GPL/CSS/JSON), with GitHub Actions CI building and testing on Linux and Windows
- Studio-style monochrome UI driven entirely by a design-token stylesheet (
Styles/Theme.axaml), with a runtime accent override
- Avalonia UI 11 (.NET 9, cross-platform desktop)
- MVVM via CommunityToolkit.Mvvm source generators (
[ObservableProperty],[RelayCommand]) - Material.Icons.Avalonia for iconography
git clone https://github.com/Megaloduck/Spectrum.git
cd Spectrum
dotnet restore
dotnet run --project Spectrum.csprojOr open Spectrum.slnx in your IDE of choice (Visual Studio, Rider, VS Code) and hit run.
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Generate a new palette | Press Space, or click Press Space to Harmonize |
| Lock a color | Click the lock icon on a swatch |
| Reorder colors | Drag a swatch card (any view mode) |
| Simulate color blindness | Analyze workspace (Ctrl+3) → Color Blind dropdown in the toolbar |
| Extract colors from an image | Extract from Image in the toolbar |
| Build a gradient | Gradient in the Studio toolbar (Ctrl+1) → copy CSS, save SVG/PNG, or add its stops to the palette |
| Score every color pair | Matrix in the Analyze toolbar (Ctrl+3) → WCAG cells + APCA tooltips + CSV copy |
| Screen eyedropper | Screen button or Ctrl+Alt+P (click anywhere to pick) |
| Export a palette | Export workspace (Ctrl+4) → build a preview, copy, Save to file… or PNG sheet… |
| Command palette | Ctrl+K |
| Switch workspace | Ctrl+1 Studio · Ctrl+2 Preview · Ctrl+3 Analyze · Ctrl+4 Export |
| Undo / redo | Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y |
| Save / load a palette file | Ctrl+S / Ctrl+O |
| New palette | Ctrl+N |
| Duplicate / delete selected swatch | Ctrl+D / Delete |
| Open color picker | Click the big base-color preview, or the palette icon on a swatch |
| Collapse library / inspector | Ctrl+B / Ctrl+I |
| Settings | Ctrl+, |
| Export to file / PNG sheet | Ctrl+E / Ctrl+J |
Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.
This project is licensed under the MIT License — see the LICENSE file for details.
Made by @Megaloduck with ❤️ using Avalonia UI