Value Study vs Mana Palette

In art, value (or tone) refers to how light or dark a colour is. If you're learning to paint or draw, doing value studies is one of the best ways to improve. These small, loose sketches in greyscale help you understand where shadows fall and highlights appear—essential for capturing depth and form. Value Study is a simple, focused tool designed to help you see values more clearly in your reference images. Instead of just converting a photo to black and white, this app lets you break down tones step by step. Start with just black and white to map out the biggest shapes, then gradually add more values to refine your understanding. You can also highlight all areas of an image that share the same value, making it easier to see subtle shifts in tone. This is especially useful in complex references, like portraits, where different parts of the image might have the same level of shadow but look completely different in colour. Value Study isn’t here to replace traditional studies—it’s here to enhance them. Whether you're sketching, painting, or working digitally, this tool makes it easier to focus on the fundamentals of light, shadow, and form. Try it for free with all features enabled on sample images from Unsplash before deciding to unlock the full app with a low-cost yearly or lifetime purchase. All Value Study Pro upgrades count as lifetime purchase. Either option will unlock Value Study across iPhone, iPad and Mac. Annual: Auto-renews yearly. Lifetime: One-time payment, no fees. Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/

Mana Palette is a color-study tool for miniature painters, illustrators, and designers — a quiet studio built around one artwork at a time. DISCOVER — Shuffle random Magic: The Gathering artworks with mana color filters, set search, artist lock, and theme search. Artist, card and source are always credited; bookmark references into your gallery. ANALYZE — A precision eyedropper with pixel loupe and adjustable sample size (1×1 to 25×25 px, correctly averaged), value study (luminance) and shape study (simplified color fields — the picker samples exactly what you see). You can also load your own image for analysis; it stays on your device. PALETTES — Collect up to 12 colors with notes and tags (per palette and per color), matched against 9 miniature paint ranges (Citadel, Vallejo, Army Painter, AK Gen3, P3, Golden SoFlat, Scale75, Reaper, Pro Acryl) via CIEDE2000 — with an adjustable dE threshold so you only see paints that really match. Shopping list included. EXPORT — Auto palette and working palettes as hex list, PNG swatch card (with color data and best paint per swatch), GPL (GIMP/Krita), CSV, and JSON — via the iOS share sheet. No accounts, no ads, no tracking. Everything stays local on your device. Works in portrait and landscape. Mana Palette is unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Fan Content Policy. Not approved/endorsed by Wizards. Portions of the materials used are property of Wizards of the Coast. (c) Wizards of the Coast LLC. Card data and imagery via Scryfall.