Static Colors

Not every build wants motion. The Static tab holds every look that stands still: a color picker that gives each device its own flat color, plus the gradients, two-tone patterns, and spectrum ramps that paint a fixed picture. Pick one and your lighting holds it, steady, until you change it.

Static works differently from every other mode, and the difference is worth knowing before you start: it is per device. You select devices in the rail, then press a color, and only those devices change. With nothing selected, a press changes every device that is not pinned to a look of its own. Animation, Media and Mirror do the opposite - one picture is rendered across the whole canvas and every device shows the part under its own frame, so a single pick drives all of them at once. That is why Static is the mode to reach for when you want the front fans blue and the strips amber, and Animation is the one to reach for when you want a wave that crosses the whole build.

1. Picking a color

  1. Open Lighting and select the Static tab.
  2. Select the devices you want in the Devices rail. Click a card to select it, Cmd or Ctrl click to add more, or use Select all. With nothing selected, the picker draws a dotted mark for every device a press would change.
  3. Press anywhere on the color field. Every selected device (with nothing selected, every unpinned one) moves to the color under the pointer, and its card in the rail shows the new color.

Each selected device rides the field as a mark sitting on the color it wears, so you can see at a glance which devices agree and which do not. The hex value of the color sits in the corner of the field with a copy button beside it.

Two picker styles sit under the field, in the Color picker group:

  • Continuous - the full field, so any color is one press away.
  • Swatches - the same field sampled on a coarse grid, so a press snaps to the nearest swatch and outlines it. Useful when you want two devices on exactly the same color.

2. Patterns

Under the picker cards, the browser holds the looks that place their own colors:

  • Gradients - Linear, Radial, Three-stop, and Conic.
  • Two-tone - Mirror, Corners, Split, Stripes, Checker, Border, Rings, Dots, and Wedges.
  • Spectrum - Ramp, Bands, and Wheel.

A pattern fills each selected device on its own rather than sampling a shared canvas, so the picker's marks go away while one is active: "Gradients and patterns place their own colors. Choose the color picker to place devices yourself." Pick the color picker again to go back to placing devices yourself.

3. Tuning a fill

The Effect Editor dock keeps the controls minimal for a flat color. There is no palette ring and no Speed - the fill is a fixed base color. Instead you get:

  • Hue shift - a small bipolar nudge to move the color toward its neighbors (a warmer blue, a colder green) without leaving the color's character.
  • Warmth - a color-temperature slider. On White this is the only slider, taking it from cool to warm white.
  • Saturation - from a soft pastel version of the color up to full vividness (not shown on White).

Patterns get their own color slots instead: a hue wheel with saturation and brightness, and a swatch row to pick which of the pattern's colors the wheel is editing.

4. One color everywhere

If per-device colors are more than you want, switch the page to Simple mode from the chip at the left of the tabs: one palette, one color on everything, and nothing else on screen. See Simple Lighting Mode.

5. Making it fit your build

A fill applies to the devices you point it at, and you shape the result per device from the Devices rail:

  • Turn lights off for a device, or turn off Nexus Control for it entirely, from the card's menu.
  • Balance brightness per device in its LED settings - useful when one strip overpowers everything else. Master brightness, at the top of the Effect Editor, still caps all of them.
  • Smart lights additionally get their own hue and saturation sliders in their LED settings, so a lamp can hold a different color than the PC.

Tip

Want a two-tone build? Zones show as separate cards, so you can give a zone its own color - or set your smart lights to a second color while the PC holds the fill.