How do you describe colors?
Let’s develop a little bit of a color vocabulary today. Please note this is different than a colorful vocabulary. We’ll start by defining three words that are essential in describing color. I’ll try to use examples for each definition with the traditional “primary colors,” which are red, blue and yellow. Class is in session…
HUE
The first of the three properties of color we’ll be looking at today. Hue, typically, is the name we associate with a color (i.e. red, blue, or yellow). The hue describes only the color itself. Describing hue can get you close to the color, but using words alone is an impossible way to describe all colors accurately. You’ll find there have been many systems to developed to identify color, quickly and accurately. Here are the variations between three examples, I’ve tried to get as close to the primary colors as possible in each system:
top–RGB values: (red 255, 0, 0. blue 0, 0, 255. yellow 255, 255, 0)
middle–Behr Paint color names: (red hot, jazz blue, and lemon zest)
bottom–Pantone Matching System: (PMS red 032, PMS reflex blue, and PMS yellow)
SATURATION
The second of the three color properties. Saturation refers to the amount or intensity of the hue in relation to a completely neutral (colorless) gray. Saturation is a sliding scale with fully saturated color at one end, and completely neutral gray at the other end. When you consider paint, desaturating a color is achieved by mixing the color’s complement. For example, mixing green with red, in the proper ratios will result in a neutral gray, demonstrated below:
VALUE
The last of the three properties. Value is a property that describes a color (or gray) that falls between white and black. The lighter or closer to white something is, the less value it has. Conversely, the closer to black something is the greater value it has. When a hue is fully saturated, it has it’s greatest value. (how about that for a sentence using all of our vocab words!) Here is a black value scale compared to a yellow value scale.
Notice that even the yellow at 100% is somewhere near the 10% black. The moral of the story, different hues, when fully saturated, have different values.
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