Mix red, green and blue light to match the target color exactly.
Ready when you are
Color Mixer is a five-round color-matching game built around the three sliders every screen uses to make color: red, green and blue. Each round puts a target swatch in front of you and asks you to rebuild it by dialing in the right amount of each channel. Your mix sits directly under the target so you can compare them side by side, and the round ends when you lock in your answer.
The memory variants flash a color and take it away. Color Mixer does the opposite: the target stays visible the whole time, and there is no timer. That changes what you are practicing. Instead of recalling a color, you are decomposing one — looking at, say, a warm orange and working out that it needs a lot of red, a fair bit of green, and almost no blue. Each slider runs from 0 to 255, the same range as an RGB color code, so the numbers you learn here map straight onto how color is stored on a computer.
Screens build color by adding light rather than mixing pigment, which is why the rules feel backwards if you grew up with paint. Everything starts at black. Add red and green and you get yellow; add green and blue and you get cyan; add red and blue and you get magenta. Push all three to the top and the light adds up to white. Pull a single channel down and the color slides toward the opposite of that channel. If you want to go deeper on why two colors combine the way they do, the article on what color two colors make walks through both additive and subtractive mixing.
Work one attribute at a time instead of chasing all three sliders at once. First read the hue: is the target warm or cool, and which primary dominates? Set that channel roughly and bring the other two up to place it on the color wheel. Next judge brightness — a dark color means every channel stays low, a bright one means at least one channel is near the top. Finish with saturation: a vivid color has a wide gap between its highest and lowest channels, while a muted or greyish color keeps the three values close together. Sneaking up on the target in small steps beats big swings, because your eye is far better at spotting “too red” than at naming an exact value from scratch.
The greys catch people out. A neutral target needs all three channels at nearly the same level, and it is easy to leave one channel slightly high, which tints the whole swatch. Very light and very dark colors are also deceptive: once a color is close to white or black, large slider moves barely change how it looks, so you can overshoot without noticing. And watch the blues — the blue channel reads as darker to the eye than red or green at the same value, so a target that looks “medium blue” often needs more blue than you would guess.
Because your mix and the target are both on screen the entire round, there is no memory penalty — every point comes down to how precisely you placed the three sliders. When you submit, the two colors are compared with CIEDE2000, a perceptual distance measure that weights the gap the way a person actually sees it, so being off in a direction the eye is sensitive to costs more than being off where it barely registers. A dead-on match is worth the full 10 for the round, and the ten drains away as the visible gap widens. Add up five rounds for your session total. If you want the detail behind the number, see what CIEDE2000 measures.
Anyone who works with color codes — designers, front-end developers, digital artists — will recognize the mental math this trains, and reading channel values gets easier once you have done it a few times. It is also a gentler entry point than the timed modes if you are new here. New to the sliders? The how to play page covers the basics, and if you would rather type the exact digits than nudge sliders, try the hex code mode.
