Taronites

I was trying to paint with a pure white color (RGB=255,255,255), but it is coming out gray instead.

What am I missing?

That it's lit by a light and doesn't glow by itself.
If you want photoshop goodness, select pure white and hit [Shift]+[L] to set the ambient light. Then select pure black and hit [L] to set the light. There you go!

So with Verve's ability to apply both an ambient lighting source value and specular value to the canvas and paint material, it is easy set approximate values to mimic "real-world" lighting color.

Here's a great reference site some of you may be interested in:

Reproducing Real World Light
http://planetpixelemporium.com/tutorialpages/light.html

Here, you'll find some great relative RGB (0-255) equivalents for common lighting sources.
To easily convert (0-255) to (0-100%) values for Verve just add '1' and multiply the sum by '0.39' for each RGB component.

One you dial in this value: (i.e. Warm Fluorescent = 100% R, 96% G, 90% B) hit [L] to set the specular (spot light) value.
To get an ambient value, simply slide the color-to-black (shade) to a lower lighting equivalent to the main value, then hit [shift]+[L].

You can of course mix lighting types such as using a sunlight value as the specular and a sky color as the ambient.

"Add 1 and multiply by 0.39"? Hahaha... why not just divide by 255?
Also, in case you were wondering, Verve uses 16bit color depth (even 32bit on depth), which is why the color values go from 0-100% instead of 8bit's 256 levels.

Also, it's not just a specular highlight, it's a full on point light that does diffuse lighting and specularity (glossiness).
I've also got planned to hook up various light sources as well as alternative "material sphere" based lighting, where you just use an image of lighting instead of computing lights. I've written a little tool called "MaCrea" with which you can generate such images and even use a tightly cropped photo of a chrome sphere to recreate various substances lit by the captured lighting situation. You'll find that on my website or just here: MaCrea

Thanks for the website, Mike. I'm sure it's useful to learn some new names for light sources for better communication. That's kinda cool.
I think, it's kind of amazing that someone would make such a list and it's also interesting to learn about the "Kelvin temperatures", how the spectrum measures translate into RGB values. I hope they're correct enough over there, hehe. I wouldn't mind to figure out a formula for that.

However, before one gets overly excited about that website... you might want to check out the whole thing, hehehe... I do like the collection of solar system planet textures. That's kinda cute!