Will adjusting colors change my thread brand?

No. If your palette uses branded colors (e.g., DMC 310), Adjust Colors finds the closest thread in the same brand after applying the shift. Your palette stays DMC (or Anchor, Cosmo, etc.) — just with different shades. Custom colors are adjusted directly.

What's the difference between Simplify Colors and Remove Unused Colors?

Simplify Colors reduces the total number of colors by merging visually similar ones — the least-used colors get merged into the closest-looking color you're keeping. Remove Unused Colors only deletes colors with zero stitches in the pattern. Simplify changes the pattern; Remove Unused doesn't.

Can I switch from DMC to Anchor and back?

Yes. Brand remap is fully undoable (Cmd/Ctrl+Z). You can remap multiple times — DMC to Anchor, then Anchor to Cosmo, etc. Each step is preserved in your undo history.

Why do some colors look the same after simplifying?

When you reduce color count, the least-used colors are merged into their closest-looking match among the kept colors. If two removed colors are both closest to the same kept color, they converge. The pattern is remapped to use the kept color everywhere the removed color appeared.

Palette Tools

Basics

Palette Tools is your "palette surgery" panel — fast, reversible changes to your whole pattern's colors.

Palette Tools menu — four operations

Open it from the palette panel (tools icon). It has four actions:

Adjust Colors — shift the feel of all colors at once (brightness, saturation, contrast, hue, warmth).
Simplify Colors — reduce color count by merging the least-used colors into the closest-looking ones.
Switch Thread Brand — remap your whole palette to another thread brand (DMC, Anchor, Cosmo, Madeira, etc.).
Remove unused colors — delete colors that have 0 stitches.

Adjust, Simplify, and Switch Brand open a sub-panel with live preview and Apply/Cancel. Remove Unused is one click — and still undoable.

Adjust Colors

Five sliders that shift your entire palette at once. Every slider previews in real time — drag and watch the pattern update.

Slider	Range	What it does
Brightness	−100 to +100	Lighten or darken all colors.
Saturation	−100 to +100	Boost or mute color intensity. −100 = full grayscale.
Contrast	−100 to +100	Expand or compress the tonal range. Makes darks darker and lights lighter (or the reverse).
Hue	−180° to +180°	Rotate all colors around the color wheel.
Warmth	−100 to +100	Push warmer (reds/yellows) or cooler (blues/greens).

All sliders default to 0 (no change). A Reset button appears when any slider is moved. Apply commits; Cancel (or Escape) reverts.

Adjust Colors — drag sliders, see palette shift live

If you're using a thread brand (DMC, Anchor, etc.), adjustments stay inside that brand. Example: if you warm up a DMC palette, each color becomes the closest-looking DMC shade — you keep real thread codes. Custom (unbranded) colors are adjusted directly.

Pro tip: Warmth is great for cold-looking photo conversions. Try +15 to +25 for skin tones and wood.

Note: While adjusting, Stitchmate hides stitch symbols temporarily so you can judge color changes clearly. They come back when you Apply or Cancel.

Simplify Colors

A single slider that reduces the number of colors in your palette. It merges the least-used colors first, matching each one into the closest-looking color you're keeping.

Slider range: 2 to your current color count.
Default: 75% of your current count (e.g., 12 out of 16).
Display: Shows "X / Y colors" as you drag.

Simplify Colors — slide to reduce, preview updates live

How Simplify chooses merges:

It starts with the colors you barely use.
Each removed color is merged into the closest-looking color you're keeping.
The pattern updates everywhere that removed color was used.

This is the fastest way to reduce confetti after photo conversion. Often you can cut 40 colors down to 20 with almost no visible loss — and the pattern becomes way nicer to stitch. If you're unsure where to aim, the how many colors to use guide has practical benchmarks by pattern type.

Pro tip: After simplifying, run Remove unused colors to clean up any stale palette slots. Then check ConfettiScope to see how much confetti remains.

Switch Thread Brand

Pick a target brand and every color in your palette is remapped to the closest-looking thread in that brand. You can also look up individual conversions in the DMC-Anchor conversion table.

Supported brands:

DMC
Anchor
Cosmo
Madeira
J&P Coates
Sullivans

Click a brand to preview the remap live on the canvas. Click Apply to commit.

Switch Thread Brand — click Anchor, palette remaps live

Stitchmate remaps each color to the closest-looking thread in the target brand, using a color-matching method designed to match how the human eye sees differences. Even large palettes remap instantly.

Note: Two similar source colors can land on the same target thread if the target brand simply doesn't have enough shades in that range. That's normal — you can tweak individual colors afterward if needed.

Remove unused colors

One-click cleanup: removes every color from your palette that has zero stitches anywhere in the pattern.

The button label shows the count: "Remove unused colors (N)". If N is 0, the button is disabled — your palette is already clean.

Click it and all unused colors are removed in one Undo step. You'll see a confirmation message.

Remove unused colors button — shows count of removable colors

This typically comes up after:

Simplify Colors — merged colors may leave behind empty palette slots.
Manual editing — erasing all stitches of a color doesn't auto-remove it from the palette.
Photo conversion — the converter may allocate colors that ended up unused.

How color matching works

Three of these tools rely on one idea: "what's the closest-looking color?"

Stitchmate tries to match colors the way humans see them, not just by raw RGB numbers. Under the hood, it uses the CIEDE2000 standard for perceptual color difference — the same method used in textile and paint manufacturing. For a deeper dive into why perceptual matching matters for cross stitch, see the color theory guide.

In practice, this means:

A dark red and a dark brown that look similar on screen will be measured as close — even though their RGB values might be very different.
Two blues that look obviously different will be measured as far apart — even if their hex codes are only a few digits away.
Matches tend to feel more "visually right" than simple RGB comparisons.

Tips & gotchas

Live preview for everything. Adjust, Simplify, and Switch Brand all show the result before you commit. Experiment freely.
Enter to apply, Escape to cancel. Works across all sub-panels.
Everything is undoable. Even Remove Unused Colors. Cmd/Ctrl+Z brings it all back.
Adjust preserves your thread brand. Brightening a DMC palette gives you brighter DMC shades, not arbitrary hex values.
Simplify merges by look, not by name. DMC 310 (Black) and DMC 3371 (Dark Brown-Black) are visually close and might merge — even though they're "different colors" in the catalog.
Remove Unused is safe to run anytime. It only touches colors with zero stitches. Run it after any major palette change to keep things tidy.
Chain operations. Common flow: Simplify → Remove Unused → Adjust → Switch Brand. Each step is undoable, so you can experiment freely.