Alpine Snow
- high altitude palette
- snowfield colours
- glacier blues
White to slate in five cool steps, with the weight held at the light end.
Opens an image model with the palette in the prompt. The same words work on a video model.
- #FFFFFF
- #E6EEF4
- #BCD0DE
- #8FA7B8
- #5A6B78
- #2E3A42
What it is for
Snow reflects the sky, so a snowfield is not white. It is a hundred cool blues with white in the highlights, and drawing that is what makes a picture cold.
The palette is also very quiet. With almost no hue in it, anything you place inside gets all the attention, which is why equipment brands live in it.
How it works
Give white the largest share. Everything else is a shadow on it.
Run the blues cool and pale. Ice blue is a shadow colour, not a paint colour, so it should be low in saturation.
Anchor with one dark rock grey. Without it the picture has no bottom and the whites stop reading as bright.
When to use it
Use it for cold, height, clarity and equipment: winter sports, technical clothing, a clean product shot, a bright editorial page.
Leave it alone for anything warm or homely. There is no comfort available in this set.
Told apart from its neighbours
Achromatic has no hue at all. This one is cool on purpose, and a real neutral grey placed beside it looks brown.
Clinical White is a functional palette built for hygiene and legibility. This one is a landscape, and its blues are much stronger.
Where it was used
Ski and mountaineering catalogues have used this set for as long as they have printed, because a coloured jacket photographed inside it does all the selling on its own.
- ski brand catalogues
- mountaineering books
- winter sports broadcast graphics
The prompt
Run it as it stands, or drop the colour clause into a prompt you already have. It works in an image prompt and in a video prompt.
<subject>, alpine snow palette of white, cool ice blue, pale slate and dark rock grey, every colour cool, the picture weighted to the light end, no warm colour anywhere, flat overcast light
What goes wrong
A photograph of a mountain comes back instead of the subject. The palette is the colour set. Name your subject first.
The whites come back cream and the cold goes. Say every colour is cool, including the whites and the highlights.
The picture settles at mid grey and turns to fog. Say it is weighted to the light end, with one dark rock grey only.
Leave out
warm light, golden hour, cream, beige, a saturated sky
Watch for
White has to be the biggest area. A snow palette used at mid value stops being snow and turns into fog.
Questions
Paint it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
Next to it in landscape
