Colors. Online color tools. Light and color: an introduction. Making fine prints in your digital darkroomLight and color: an introductionby Norman Koren updated Jan. 8, 2004 This page introduces the basic concepts of light and color. Color theory is dealt with in more depth in the series on Color management. Light and Color We begin with a review of light and color. The concepts presented here-- additive and subtractive color and their respective primaries-- are critically important for image editing. You may skip to the next section if you are familiar with them. The human eye is sensitive to electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths between about 380 and 700 nanometers. Additive color: Combine light sources, starting with darkness (black). You can obtain a wide range of colors, but not all the colors the eye can see, by combining RGB light.
Color models If you lighten or darken color images you need to understand how color is represented. Now the important part. HSV and HSL are illustrated above for red (H=0). Jemima's Chevron: Color Wheel. Where am I now? This section of Jemima's Chevron is devoted to the 4096 Color Wheel. This page includes an brief explanation of web-safe, web-smart, unsafe, RGB, and HSV colors, the version history of the color wheel, and links to other helpful color pages. About the Web-smart Colors Once, long ago, monitors could display only a restricted number of colors without dithering or other color discrepancies. Time passed, as it so frequently does, and new hardware supported thousands or millions of colors. The unsafe colors are the full set of 16,777,216 hexadecimal colors, featuring any color between #000000 and #ffffff, such as #5a832d. About RGB and HSV Colors Web colors are RGB colors.
HSV is an alternate color map which is more user-friendly. Because RGB is so opaque, I converted the underlying wheel mechanics to HSV, and added an SV square to the right of the color wheel corresponding to the last chosen color. History of the Wheel The French translation was kindly provided by Nicolas Taffin. MoreCrayons - Welcome to moreCrayons.