Magipal · Windows

A palette manager that answers questions.

Built for pixel artists, indie game developers, and anyone who likes playing with colours and swatches.

Organise

Palettes and folders, drag to rearrange, rename anything. Lock a finished palette so nothing changes it by accident, or cap one at 4, 8, 16, or 32 colours and have the limit enforced on save.

Every change is undoable, including deleting a whole palette by mistake.

The Magipal window: a sidebar of saved palettes beside the eight swatches of Neon Pulse 8, each labelled with its hex code.

Check

The part most palette tools skip. Magipal will tell you what your colours actually do:

Preview the palette under protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia, and get told exactly which pairs stop being distinguishable.
A WCAG contrast grid of every pair, with its ratio and pass level. Each cell is drawn in the colours it's reporting on, so you see the answer as well as read it.
Preview Bayer 4×4 ordered dithering between any two colours.

A contrast grid of every colour pair, each cell drawn in the two colours it reports on and labelled with its ratio. — Contrast grid

The palette shown under normal vision, protanopia, deuteranopia and tritanopia, with two confusable pairs flagged beneath. — Colour-blind preview

Ordered dither blends between each adjacent pair of palette colours, each labelled with the two hex codes it sits between. — Dithering

Create

An HSV picker with recent colours. Shade and highlight ramps generated from any colour, with optional hue shifting.

Coming Soon: A randomiser that builds palettes from harmonies- monochrome, analogous, complementary, triadic, tetradic.

Sorting by hue, saturation, lightness, or luminance is non-destructive. It never touches what's saved.

The ramp dialog: a five-step shade and highlight ramp from a magenta base, with hue-shift controls.

Get it in and out

Import from Lospec by slug or URL with author attribution, sample from a PNG, or paste a list of hex codes.

Export as a hex list, CSS variables, GPL for GIMP, Krita, Inkscape and Aseprite, ASE for Photoshop, Illustrator and Affinity, a PNG swatch sheet, or indexed JSON. Colour names carry through to ASE and GPL.

The Lospec import dialog: a palette slug has been fetched, previewing AG-500Redux by sudo_whoami and its twelve colours before import. — Import from Lospec

The PNG import dialog on its grid-sample tab, reading eight colours from a swatch strip at a set number of columns and rows. — Sample a swatch grid

The PNG import dialog on its click-sample tab, picking individual colours from a piece of reference art. — Sample by clicking

The export menu: hex list, CSS variables, GIMP palette, PNG swatch sheet, Adobe Swatch Exchange, and indexed RGB. — Export formats

Comfort

Light and dark themes, and three swatch styles: squares, circles, or a continuous bar.

Interface scaling runs from 100% to 175%, and scales the whole interface including click targets, not only the text. There's a high contrast mode on top of default themes that already meet WCAG AA, and controls can be set to stay put rather than appear on hover for anyone who can't hover precisely.

Magipal in its light theme with the settings panel open, showing theme, swatch style, interface size, high contrast, and always-show-controls options.

Platform

Windows

Price

Free

Licence

MIT, open source

Your palettes are plain JSON in your own app-data folder, and writes are atomic- a crash mid-save can't cost you your work. Magipal reaches the network only when you import from Lospec and when it checks for a new version; the privacy policy covers both.

Windows will show a SmartScreen warning on install, because the app isn't code-signed yet. Magipal's README explains exactly why, and how to check for yourself.