In color theory, a tint is a mixture of a color with white, which increases lightness, while a shade is a mixture with black, which increases darkness. Both processes affect the resulting color mixture's relative saturation. A tone is produced either by mixing a color with gray, or by both tinting and shading. [1] Mixing a color with any neutral color (including black, gray, and white) reduces the chroma, or colorfulness, while the hue (the relative mixture of red, green, blue, etc., depending on the colorspace) remains unchanged.
In the graphic arts, especially printmaking and drawing, "tone" has a different meaning, referring to areas of continuous color, produced by various means, as opposed to the linear marks made by an engraved or drawn line.
In common language, the term shade can be generalized to encompass any varieties of a particular color, whether technically they are shades, tints, tones, or slightly different hues. [2] Meanwhile, the term tint can be generalized to refer to any lighter or darker variation of a color (e.g. "tinted windows"). [3]
When mixing colored light (additive color models), the achromatic mixture of spectrally balanced red, green, and blue (RGB) is always white, not gray or black. When we mix colorants, such as the pigments in paint mixtures, a color is produced which is always darker and lower in chroma, or saturation, than the parent colors. This moves the mixed color toward a neutral color—a gray or near-black. Lights are made brighter or dimmer by adjusting their brightness, i.e., energy level; in painting, lightness is adjusted through mixture with white, black, or a color's complement.
The Color Triangle depicting tint, shade, and tone was proposed in 1937 by Faber Birren. [4]
It is common among some artistic painters to darken a paint color by adding black paint—producing colors called shades—or to lighten a color by adding white—producing colors called tints. However, this is not always the best way for representational painting, since one result is for colors to also shift in their hues. For instance, darkening a color by adding black can cause colors such as yellows, reds and oranges to shift toward the greenish or bluish part of the spectrum. Lightening a color by adding white can cause a shift towards blue[ clarification needed ] when mixed with reds and oranges (see Abney effect).
Another practice when darkening a color is to use its opposite, or complementary, color (e.g. violet-purple added to yellowish-green) in order to neutralize it without a shift in hue, and darken it if the additive color is darker than the parent color. When lightening a color this hue shift can be corrected with the addition of a small amount of an adjacent color to bring the hue of the mixture back in line with the parent color (e.g. adding a small amount of orange to a mixture of red and white will correct the tendency of this mixture to shift slightly towards the blue end of the spectrum).
Cyan is the color between blue and green on the visible spectrum of light. It is evoked by light with a predominant wavelength between 490 and 520 nm, between the wavelengths of green and blue.
In color theory, hue is one of the main properties of a color, defined technically in the CIECAM02 model as "the degree to which a stimulus can be described as similar to or different from stimuli that are described as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet," within certain theories of color vision.
HSL and HSV are the two most common cylindrical-coordinate representations of points in an RGB color model. The two representations rearrange the geometry of RGB in an attempt to be more intuitive and perceptually relevant than the cartesian (cube) representation. Developed in the 1970s for computer graphics applications, HSL and HSV are used today in color pickers, in image editing software, and less commonly in image analysis and computer vision.
In computing, on the X Window System, X11 color names are represented in a simple text file, which maps certain strings to RGB color values. It was traditionally shipped with every X11 installation, hence the name, and is usually located in <X11root>/lib/X11/rgb.txt
. The web colors list is descended from it but differs for certain color names.
Color theory, or more specifically traditional color theory, is the historical body of knowledge describing the behavior of colors, namely in color mixing, color contrast effects, color harmony, color schemes and color symbolism. Modern color theory is generally referred to as Color science. While there is no clear distinction in scope, traditional color theory tends to be more subjective and have artistic applications, while color science tends to be more objective and have functional applications, such as in chemistry, astronomy or color reproduction. Color theory dates back at least as far as Aristotle's treatise On Colors. A formalization of "color theory" began in the 18th century, initially within a partisan controversy over Isaac Newton's theory of color and the nature of primary colors. By the end of the 19th century, a schism had formed between traditional color theory and color science.
This is an index of color topic-related articles.
A color term is a word or phrase that refers to a specific color. The color term may refer to human perception of that color which is usually defined according to the Munsell color system, or to an underlying physical property. There are also numerical systems of color specification, referred to as color spaces.
A color model is an abstract mathematical model describing the way colors can be represented as tuples of numbers, typically as three or four values or color components. When this model is associated with a precise description of how the components are to be interpreted, taking account of visual perception, the resulting set of colors is called "color space."
The Abney effect or the purity-on-hue effect describes the perceived hue shift that occurs when white light is added to a monochromatic light source.
A color solid is the three-dimensional representation of a color space or model and can be thought as an analog of, for example, the one-dimensional color wheel, which depicts the variable of hue ; or the two-dimensional chromaticity diagram, which depicts the variables of hue and colorfulness. The added spatial dimension allows a color solid to depict the three dimensions of color: lightness, hue, and colorfulness, allowing the solid to depict all conceivable colors in an organized three-dimensional structure.
Varieties of the color red may differ in hue, chroma or lightness, or in two or three of these qualities. Variations in value are also called tints and shades, a tint being a red or other hue mixed with white, a shade being mixed with black. A large selection of these various colors are shown below.
Blend modes in digital image editing and computer graphics are used to determine how two layers are blended with each other. The default blend mode in most applications is simply to obscure the lower layer by covering it with whatever is present in the top layer ; because each pixel has numerical values, there also are many other ways to blend two layers.
There are three types of color mixing models, depending on the relative brightness of the resultant mixture: additive, subtractive, and average. In these models, mixing black and white will yield white, black and gray, respectively. Physical mixing processes, e.g. mixing light beams or oil paints, will follow one or a hybrid of these 3 models. Each mixing model is associated with several color models, depending on the approximate primary colors used. The most common color models are optimized to human trichromatic color vision, therefore comprising three primary colors.
A color space is a specific organization of colors. In combination with color profiling supported by various physical devices, it supports reproducible representations of color – whether such representation entails an analog or a digital representation. A color space may be arbitrary, i.e. with physically realized colors assigned to a set of physical color swatches with corresponding assigned color names, or structured with mathematical rigor. A "color space" is a useful conceptual tool for understanding the color capabilities of a particular device or digital file. When trying to reproduce color on another device, color spaces can show whether shadow/highlight detail and color saturation can be retained, and by how much either will be compromised.
Varieties of the color blue may differ in hue, chroma, or lightness, or in two or three of these qualities. Variations in value are also called tints and shades, a tint being a blue or other hue mixed with white, a shade being mixed with black. A large selection of these colors is shown below.
This article provides introductory information about the RGB, HSV, and HSL color models from a computer graphics perspective. An introduction to colors is also provided to support the main discussion.
The Color Naming System (CNS) is a systematic notation for named colors for computer applications using English terms created by Berk et al. in 1982.
Since the introduction of Crayola drawing crayons by Binney & Smith in 1903, more than two hundred colors have been produced in a wide variety of assortments. The line has undergone several major revisions, notably in 1935, 1949, 1958, and 1990. Numerous specialty crayons have also been produced, complementing the basic Crayola assortment.