Color Assistant

Every painting app buries its color picker inside its own panels — changing colors means dragging your eyes and cursor away from the canvas. The Color Assistant pulls the color wheel out into a small always-on-top floating palette: it hovers over your painting app, and every color you pick is written straight into your brush's foreground color. No window switching, no pasting.

What it does

Press the hotkey (default Ctrl + Shift + C, configurable) and a small palette window pops up. Pick a color on it, and it's written directly into the foreground color of whatever painting app is running — CLIP Studio Paint and Photoshop are both supported. Press the hotkey again to dismiss; position and size are remembered.

The wheel uses the OKHSL perceptual color space. The difference from an ordinary HSV wheel: colors on the same ring share the same lightness. Slide around the ring to change hue and the value structure of your painting stays put — no surprise jumps in brightness. Angle is hue (blue at the bottom, matching CSP's color wheel), distance from center is saturation, and the vertical bar on the right controls lightness.

How to use it

Two ways to summon it:

• Global hotkey: default Ctrl + Shift + C (changeable under Settings → Hotkeys), works even when the app is in the background. The current binding is shown in the palette's title bar
• Stardial wheel: double-tap Ctrl to open the Stardial and pick "Color Assistant"

Besides the wheel, the panel carries a few small tools:

• Foreground / background slots: stacked Photoshop-style; click the back swatch to swap. What gets written to your painting app is always the foreground color
• Color history: your recent picks in a strip — click one to bring it back
• Eyedropper: sample a color from anywhere on screen; it fills the wheel and is written to your painting app
• Copy: copy the current color's HEX to the clipboard, paste it anywhere

Working with your painting app

The Color Assistant detects which painting app is running and picks the best link for it:

CLIP Studio Paint (international)

Uses CSP's official Companion Mode protocol — precise and bidirectional. Pick a color on the palette and CSP's foreground color changes instantly; pick a color inside CSP and the palette wheel follows.

The first time, a pairing step is needed: Nephele configures everything automatically, then asks you to restart CSP once (there's a "Restart CSP" button on the panel — it goes through CSP's own save prompts, your work is never discarded). After the restart it pairs automatically, and every later launch connects silently. If the automatic connection ever fails, the palette falls back to eyedropper-based writing — picking colors still works; only the read-back direction pauses.

优动漫 PAINT (the Chinese edition, PRO / EX)

The Chinese edition doesn't ship the Companion protocol, so writing goes through the on-screen eyedropper: on first use, Nephele configures a picking shortcut automatically and asks you to restart it once (if you already had an on-screen color-picking shortcut bound, that one is reused and no restart is needed). After that, picking on the palette writes into the foreground color.

To let the palette read back color changes made on 优动漫's side (say you picked with its own color wheel), click Calibrate on the panel, then click 优动漫's foreground color swatch once — sync is automatic from then on. If a window resize invalidates the calibration, the status line will ask you to calibrate again.

Photoshop

Opens linked, zero configuration. Fully bidirectional: the palette writes PS's foreground color, and color changes made inside PS sync back to the wheel.

Other apps

The palette itself still works — pick, sample, copy HEX, and paste into any color picker by hand.

Value check

Mid-painting and want to verify your values? Hit the Value check button on the panel and the whole screen turns grayscale — canvas, references, everything at once. Hit it again to restore.

How the grayscale is computed is a three-way choice under Settings → Luminance algorithm:

The three only differ on vivid colors. This setting is shared with the Reference Board's grayscale mode — the two always agree.

Next steps

• Color Picker — the full-screen eyedropper, pick a color from anywhere on screen
• Stardial — the radial quick menu on double-Ctrl
• Reference Board — pin references on screen, with the same grayscale check