What's new in Polychrome

10 October 2026

The trial and activation work on every Mac

• On a Mac without Homebrew, Polychrome could not reach our servers: Start free trial said "Could not reach the activation service", activating a licence failed the same way, and the app never heard about new versions. It now works on every Mac. If you use a Mac, your copy could not tell you about this update, so download 1.1.2 from the download page.

Switch out black on toolchangers

• A new Bambu printer box sits under switch out black, ticked by default. Bambu printers lock the filament during a pause, so Polychrome finishes the base on another spool first, with a tiny dot or tab. Untick it for a toolchanger such as the Snapmaker U1, or any printer that can swap filament while paused: the plate gets a plain pause instead, and the last base layer prints faster.

Smaller things

• On a Windows PC without Microsoft's WebView2, Polychrome now opens in your browser instead of showing a blank window.
• When a plate needs more memory than your computer has free, the message now also suggests fewer spools, with the numbers.

28 September 2026

Read your calibration card with a photo

• Match a few squares by eye, and a photo of the card reads the rest. Press Record readings on the Calibrate page, then Read with a photo under the list of spools.
• Polychrome finds the card in your photo by itself. If it can't, you click the card's four corners.
• You match about two squares per spool, then Read the rest sets the sliders for every spool. Fine tune by eye if you like, and save as usual.
• The photo stays on your computer.
• On a Mac you can use an iPhone's HEIC photo directly. On Windows, use a JPEG or PNG. The app explains how to get a JPEG from an iPhone.
• A photo that is too bright or too dark to read is turned away, with a note on how to take it again.
• The same spools now always make a card with its colour rows in the same order. If your printed card has its rows in a different order from the one on screen, the photo reading notices and reads it as printed.
• Matching every square by eye works exactly as before.

Settings in one click

• A new Settings section at the top of the Studio: the presets Fast, Medium, High detail and Custom first, then Flat or Relief, switch out black and the plate size.
• Fast uses 4 colour layers, Medium 8, and High detail 16 with 4 colour changes per column. High detail is marked Recommended when your palette has two or more translucent spools.
• More options, Filaments and Image start folded. Change anything under More options and the row switches to Custom.

A new Image section

• Soften picture evens out texture and noise before the colours are chosen. Method 1 averages close neighbours. Method 2 reaches much further, so big soft areas like a sky even out more.
• Smooth flat areas joins neighbouring areas of almost the same colour into bigger ones.
• Remove specks gives tiny spots the colour around them. It starts on, at Mid.
• Lift blacks and Hold whites keep some detail in the darkest and brightest parts of the picture, so they stop printing as one flat black or white shape.
• The gamut map and Coverage moved here, next to the picture they measure.
• The preview and the plate change together, so what you see is what prints.

Easier to follow

• Each palette card says how many colours its own plate would use at your plate size. That count is for one picture, so it is smaller than the full range five rolls can make.
• When a spool in the chosen palette is not measured yet, a notice on the preview says so, with a Calibrate these spools button. It replaces the small warning icon on the palette cards.
• Ranking shows what it is doing, how far along it is and roughly how long is left. Changing a setting while it ranks stops the old ranking and starts the new one.
• Tooltips now carry small diagrams for the settings that need one, like the presets, colour layers, relief and flat, switch out black, edges and the Image controls.
• Two finished example plates, Napoleon and a red-eyed tree frog, wait on the Plates page. They use the starter spools and print without a licence. The tour now ends on one of them.

Filaments

• Two new buttons in the Studio's Filaments section: Lock current palette (the lock) locks in every spool of the selected palette, and Clear selections (the arrow) puts every spool back to available.
• Group the filament chips by Finish or Material, or show All in one list. Hover a chip to see the spool's name.
• Paste spool data on the Filaments page takes the text from a spool's copy button, from this computer or another one. It shows what would change before you apply it, and you can undo the last paste.

Plates

• The 2D view of a plate has the same audit tools as the 3D view: remove top layers, the layer strip, coverage, the hover card, and clicking a filament in the coverage list to see where it is.
• The slot list on the print sheet now includes the spool you swap in at the pause: which one, which slot and when.
• The Bambu Studio project now places the prime tower beside the plate as a long thin tower, so it fits next to a full size plate. Rib wall is off, so you can still drag it and change its width in Bambu Studio.

Fixes

• On a Mac, a slow first ranking could stop with "Ranking failed: Load failed". It now keeps going and shows its progress.
• In the card reader, Hue turns a spool's colour over black and over white together. Before, the squares over white did not move.
• Clicking a square on the card to pick a colour only changes the spool of that square's row. Before, it could jump to another spool, such as White.
• Activating again on the same computer no longer uses up one of your three activations.
• The starter white spool is Bambu Lab Basic Jade White PLA (10100). It was listed under the wrong product code before.

Everything else

• The build animation shows every spool in the palette, white included.
• The Mac version now requires macOS 14 or later.

21 September 2026

A better start

• A new starter set of five Bambu Lab filaments, measured on a real printer: Matte Charcoal, Basic White, Basic Yellow, Translucent Red and Basic Cyan.
• A new first example, Napoleon Crossing the Alps, printed with exactly those filaments. The examples now carry full size pictures, so a plate built from one has all the detail a finer column size can give.
• A short note on first launch explains that the starter filaments are a starting point, with a link to add your own.

Improved colour accuracy

• The built in filament numbers were re-measured from printed calibration cards. Previews are closer to what comes off the printer. If you have not calibrated your own filaments, your previews may look a little different after updating.
• Polychrome now picks the whitest filament as its white, not just the lightest one. A pale yellow is no longer mistaken for white.

Calibration is easier to follow

• The calibration card is laid out as three clear jobs: a dark base, a light backing, and up to three colours to measure.
• One build button, not two.
• If the printed card already matches the screen, press matches and you are done.
• After recording you get a short summary of what changed, with the numbers tucked under details, and a remove this reading button if you recorded by accident.
• Recording the same card twice replaces the earlier reading, so it no longer fights with itself.
• A filament that has never been measured now says so plainly.
• Add any filament as your own spool straight from the name box, even if it is not in the catalogue.

Faster prints

• The Bambu Studio project now travels faster between colours and uses line widths tuned for thin colour layers. On the test plate the estimated print time dropped from 3 h 20 min to 2 h 48 min.

Everything else

• The app tells you when a new version is out, and shows how long your free updates run.
• A Get a licence button in the licence window, and a link to the guide.
• Clearer advice on when to use the Bambu Studio project and when to use the plain 3MF.
• A long session no longer slows down, and the app uses less memory.
• Resetting the app keeps your licence and tells you where your old data was saved.
• The app opens reliably when another copy is already running.

17 September 2026

• Fixed: on Windows the app could fail to open at all when it came from a downloaded zip.