What is hue and saturation

Hue spectrum has three primary colors, three secondary colors, and six tertiary colors. Saturation is the measure of the strength of hue included in the color. At maximum saturation, the color is almost like the hue and contains no grey. At the minimum, the color contains the maximum amount of grey. Email required.

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Written by : Tabitha Njogu. National Bureau of Standards. National Bureau of Standards Circular, Issues Department of Commerce, National Bureau of Standards. Interaction of Color: 50th Anniversary Edition. Yale University Press, User assumes all risk of use, damage, or injury.

You agree that we have no liability for any damages. Author Recent Posts. Tabitha Njogu. She has had the pleasure of working with various organizations and garnered expertise in business management, business administration, accounting, finance operations, and digital marketing. This process can continue filling in colors around the wheel. The next level colors, the tertiary colors, are those colors between the secondary and primary colors.

As you move into the center of the wheel, the hue we are using to describe the color dominates less and less. When you reach the center of the wheel, no hue dominates. These colors directly on the central axis are considered desaturated. The first example below describes the general direction color must move on the color circle to become more saturated towards the outside.

The second example depicts how a single color looks completely saturated, having no other hues present in the color. In terms of a spectral definition of color, value describes the overall intensity or strength of the light. If hue can be thought of as a dimension going around a wheel, then value is a linear axis running through the middle of the wheel, as seen below:. HSV Model with Hue, Saturation, and Value Explained To better visualize even more, look at the example below showing a full color range for a single hue:.

HSV Model With Full Range of Single Hue Now, if you imagine that each hue was also represented as a slice like the one above, we would have a solid, upside-down cone of colors. The example above can be considered a slice of the cone.

This vertical center axis of complete desaturation is referred to as grayscale. See how this slice below translates into some isolated color swatches:. Cone Slice Swatches Color Pickers With this explanation, it might be much easier to then understand how modern color pickers work. There are many types of color pickers, but this example will focus on the common Adobe software interface picker, continuing to use the red hue as the example below. In Figure-1 below, first notice the center vertical slider.

This is where we select the hue.