About the Color Mixer
Sometimes you don't want a whole palette or a tonal ramp — you just want to know what color sits exactly halfway between two specific colors, or what happens if you lean the blend 70% toward one of them. This mixer takes two colors and a ratio slider and calculates the precise blended result, which is useful both as a practical design tool and as a way to build intuition for how colors combine.
How it works
Pick two colors and adjust the mix ratio slider between them. The tool linearly interpolates each RGB channel between your two colors based on the ratio you've set — at 50%, the result is an even blend; at 20%, the result leans heavily toward the first color; at 80%, it leans heavily toward the second. The blended result updates live as either color or the ratio changes, giving you an exact, repeatable in-between color rather than an eyeballed guess.
Common use cases
- Finding the exact midpoint color between two brand colors for a transitional UI element
- Blending a color partway toward white or black for a custom lighter or darker variant not on a standard tonal scale
- Exploring what a partial color transition looks like before committing to a full gradient
- Mixing two paint or ink reference colors digitally before a physical mixing session
- Teaching or learning basic color mixing concepts with exact, reproducible numeric results
Tips for best results
Mixing two very different hues (for example, a bright red and a bright blue) at a 50/50 ratio often produces a muddy, desaturated result rather than a vibrant purple — that's an accurate reflection of how RGB channel averaging actually works, and it's worth experimenting with the ratio slider to find a blend that stays visually interesting rather than assuming the exact midpoint is always the most useful stop. If you specifically want a lighter or darker version of one color rather than a genuine blend of two different hues, the Shades & Tints Generator is a more direct tool for that particular job.
Frequently asked questions
The tool performs linear interpolation on each of the red, green, and blue channels independently, weighted by your chosen ratio. A 50% ratio takes the exact numeric average of both colors' RGB values; other ratios weight the result proportionally toward one color or the other.
This is an inherent property of RGB channel averaging rather than a bug — mixing complementary or very different hues numerically often lands on a lower-saturation, more neutral color than either original, which is a different result than physically mixing pigments.
This tool is built specifically for precise two-color blending and ratio control. For combining several colors into a broader palette, the Color Palette Generator or Complementary Color Finder are better suited to that multi-color task.
It follows the same general linear interpolation concept that the modern CSS color-mix() function uses in its default RGB interpolation mode, though CSS also supports mixing in other color spaces like HSL or LCH, which can produce different-looking results for the same two input colors.
Yes — the resulting blended color is shown as a copyable HEX value, ready to paste directly into any CSS property that accepts a color.