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Palette Pick

pick the 3 colours that carry the scene

round
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score
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best
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Reading the colours a picture runs on

Every scene was painted from a palette the drill already knows, and your job is to find three of its colours in the chip grid: the biggest area, the second colour, and the small loud one — dominant, secondary and accent, in any order. Three scenes make a round, running from bold flats to quieter low-chroma work. After you lock in, the grid stays on screen with the true chips ringed, each real colour butted edge to edge against your pick and the strip above the scene lettered D / S / A / m by role.

The trap worth knowing is area. A scene carries unscored side colours too, so a wide dull band can occupy more surface than the loud note and still not be what the picture is about. Half-shutting your eyes settles the big two; the accent has to be hunted with the eyes open. The exact cluster colours are always planted somewhere in the grid, alongside decoy off-tone chips so hunting for an odd-looking square never pays, and the clusters are kept far enough apart that a clean 100 stays reachable.

Turning three chips into a number

Your picks are matched to the true clusters by testing all six assignments and keeping the best, so three well-read colours are never marked down for being paired off badly. Each pairing is then scored on the Lab distance between your chip and the true colour, weighted 45 / 33 / 22 by how much the role carries. A miss is measured in grid cells rather than raw ΔE, against the average ΔE between neighbouring chips, so landing one square off costs about half that role's points, not all. Hitting the accent within ΔE 20 adds 6, three near-identical picks are refused outright, and the round is the mean of its three scenes. Nothing here is a model reading the picture — the scene was painted from those clusters before you saw it, so every comparison is arithmetic against an answer that already existed.

More colour drills: Mix to Target · Value Trap · Neutral Hunt · the whole catalogue