Looking for newbie guide to dye

Couldn't find the topic in search, but I'm sure this has been asked before.

After 6 months in game, I've accumulated a fair bit of skins and dyes, and am ready to be more serious about my fashion wars.Could someone recommend a newbie's guide to dying armor?

If you haven't already, "Use" the dyes to move them to your wardrobe. Then get the armour (or outfit) set up the way you want, and switch to the "Dyes" part of the hero panel. On the left is a grid of your available dyes (can be set to show ones you haven't unlocked yet as well so that you can try them). Above them are three controls: a brush, an eraser, and an eye-dropper.

The brush is the basic tool. It allows you to select the dye you want from the grid and then click the square patterns by your equipped gear that show the "dye channels" to apply the dye to that channel. As you hover over the pattern before clicking, the character portrait shows what effect it will have if you apply the dye there.

The eraser is used to restore a dye channel to its default colour. Again, as you use it, you'll see a preview of its effect.

The eyedropper is used to copy a dye from one channel to one or more others. Click the dropper, click the source channel, and you switch to the brush with that channel's colour selected.

When you have something you like, AND none of the dyes in it are still locked, press "Apply" on the right to permanently (i.e. until the next time you change it) apply the schema you've created, or click "Reset" to undo all the changes.

Click the horseshoe at the top above the dye channels to access the dye channels in your mounts, if you have any.

Steve already covered the mechanics of it, and other than that it's largely personal preference - there's no right or wrong choices for dyes, just what you like.

One thing to be aware of however is that the material you're applying the dye to will affect it, so the same dye will look different on cloth, leather and metal, sometimes dramatically different. Especially with 'two tone' dyes like Heirloom, Midnight Ice/Fire or Abyssal Sea - on some materials they will be a uniform, dark colour (for example until Shadow Abyss was released Midnight Ice could be the darkest black on cloth) and on others they can look totally different - dark blue for Midnight Ice, or fade from blue to black.

I recommend being open-minded on which colours you choose and always experimenting with a few options. I definitely have my favourite dyes for each character but sometimes those don't look quite right and one I'd never considered before is perfect (including some which look quite dull or ugly in the preview window).

I also recommend trying to avoid falling into the trap of using the rarest/most expensive dye or your favourite colour in the 'main' dye slot, the one which covers the largest area. Rare and expensive dyes are often bright colours and sometimes you get the best effect by using them to highlight details rather than as a 'background' to something else.

An easy approach would be using something like http://colorschemedesigner.com/csd-3.5/ to select a color scheme then using https://www.gw2bltc.com/en/tool/dye/search to find the colosest matching dye

@"Khisanth.2948" said:An easy approach would be using something like http://colorschemedesigner.com/csd-3.5/ to select a color scheme then using https://www.gw2bltc.com/en/tool/dye/search to find the colosest matching dye

That won't help much, if you mix-n-match armors, because the same dye affects differently to different armor pieces.

Your "only" options are something like: (1) choose the armor pieces you think fit well to your purposes, (2) choose the coloring "scheme" (is this dark + red, light + blue, purple details on dark blue, and so on, and so on), (3) try dyeing the chosen armor pieces and see what happens: sometimes you can mix-and-match the color scheme to pieces from different sets, sometimes you can't and you either need to switch that armor piece, or try another coloring scheme. "Fashion Wars" will be infinite effort because of the imperfectness in armor sets, matching pieces from different sets, and trying to color them to fit your idea :)

I usually find a color scheme I like and then go through my available options, switching through similar hues to find the one I like best.

You'll notice that dyes are not simply flat, uniform colors. They have textures as well and will look very different from one channel to the next.

Generally, the brightest colors and textures with the most contrast are found in the rare and exclusive categories, but you really never know how a dye will look until you try it!