HSL color model

you've just seen how any color can be represented by blending together different amounts of three colors red green and blue for example the RGB value of this gold color is 100% red slightly less green and no blue but as you may have noticed in the previous exercise it's fairly difficult to find the correct RGB values to match a desired color so artists have developed new ways to specify colors in a more intuitive way one popular method they use is called HSL short for hue saturation and lightness similar to the HSV we saw earlier artists use a tool called a color wheel to pick the hue and saturation they like hue is what we normally call color is based on the position around this wheel such as this red saturation defines how pure a color is and saturation is based on the distance from the center of this wheel if we want to desaturate we move inward and if we want to saturate we move outward for example to saturate this shade of red we remove any contribution of green and blue whereas to desaturate it we instead increase the contribution of green and blue taken to the extreme this trends towards gray because the three color contributions are equal so at full desaturation our red becomes a chromatic or colorless if an artist wants to use a strong yellow they first have to find the yellow hue they want then they move in the radial direction to saturate or desaturate it finally there is lightness which is adjusted using a separate slider for example we can take our yellow from very low lightness like this to a very high lightness like this you can already see that this is a much more intuitive way of finding colors compared to using RGB values okay let's pause here so you can get the hang of HSL color selection in the next exercise