Color Aware Mode
Height by Color, Not Brightness
What It Does
Instead of mapping brightness to height, Color Aware looks at the actual colors in your image and assigns them to different height ranges. Red, green, and blue each contribute independently — so two pixels with similar brightness but different colors will end up at different heights.
Colors are sorted into up to three bins (based on their dominant color channel), and each bin gets its own height zone. Within each bin, brightness still determines height — just like Standard mode. Think of it as up to three Standard mode filament paintings stacked on top of each other, one per color channel.
You control which colors end up at the top of your print and which stay at the bottom. This makes Color Aware ideal for filament painting — each filament color occupies a distinct band of layers, giving you clean color separation.
This is especially powerful when brightness-based modes (Standard, Combo) mix up colors that happen to be similarly bright but should clearly be different layers in your print.
When To Use It
- Images with distinct color regions you want at different heights in the print.
- Multi-color filament painting — when each filament should occupy a clean, separate layer band.
- When Standard/Combo gets confused — if two different colors have similar brightness and end up blended together, Color Aware separates them by hue instead.
- Works especially well with Color Drop — the naturally repeating dark-to-light sections create ideal nesting candidates.
Not the Best Fit For
- Images where colors from different bins blend together or sit next to each other — Color Aware assigns height by color bin, so adjacent colors from different bins will create hard edges. Use Color Match instead for these images.
- Grayscale or low-color images — if your image is mostly shades of gray, Color Aware has nothing to separate. Use Standard/Combo instead.
- Images where brightness already gives good results — Color Aware adds complexity. If Standard/Combo looks great, there's no reason to switch.
Key Controls
Control which colors map to which heights. Each preset defines a different ordering of red, green, and blue in the height stack. Try a few to see which best matches your image.
Exclude a color channel from the height calculation entirely. Useful when one channel is adding noise to the height map.
Adjust individual channel brightness before processing. Lets you fine-tune how much influence each color has on the final height.
Adjusts the weighting between color-based and standard brightness. Lower values = mostly color-driven height. Higher values = more brightness influence mixed in.
Example
Click an image to see it full size