Main content
Pixar in a Box
HSL color space
Uncover the magic of hue, saturation, and lightness (HSL) in color creation using the hue saturation wheel, where hue is defined by the angle and saturation is defined by the radius. Adjusting the lightness dimension creates lighter or darker shades of any color on the hue saturation wheel, effectively fine-tuning the final color to match your desired outcome.
Want to join the conversation?
- Ok, so now we just learned about the color wheel and the color cube. And now in this video now we learned the color cylinder. Are there any more color "things" like that?(12 votes)
- There are some cones in some models. And the shape of the colors an actual imaging device is capable of displaying is a weird horseshoe shape. The cube and cylinder are the most important models for color science, though. Everything else fits inside them.(10 votes)
- At, how come RGB aren't natural for artists to use? 0:07(9 votes)
- It's possible for artists to use RGB to come up with colors, but it takes a lot of practice to remember how they relate to each other. RGB is counterintuitive to everything we learn about mixing paints to make colors. Instead of Blue and Yellow make Green, We have Red and Green make Yellow. So the HSL model is just a method that is easier for most people to learn and use.(10 votes)
- I'm still a little confused, what's the difference between saturation and lightness? They do basically the same thing.(6 votes)
- Saturation is how vibrant a color is and lightness is how light or dark it is. A color can be dark without being saturated and light while being saturated.(4 votes)
- why artists don't use RGB colors(3 votes)
- Most of them, use HSL system. It's most visuable, so they can find the exact color they need.(3 votes)
- Were those mathematicians artists? Or why did they decide to see color spatially?(2 votes)
- They were likely computer programmers. Both math and color are huge parts of creating the displays you see today, and they are rarely mutually exclusive. Keeping track of masses of numbers and what they do can be confusing to even the most experienced mathematician, and the brain tends to absorb knowledge and comprehend what it's learned better when said knowledge is presented visually. So, to provide a better visual for what they were doing with numbers to help them create colors more easily and without so many numbers, they created all the tools you just learned about.(4 votes)
- In the color cylinder, if the light increases on top, shouldn't the whole top surface of the cylinder be completely white?
If that is true, and supposing that's true for black too, isn't it enough for the top and bottom surfaces to be just dots? White and black respectively. In that case, I think that the shape would be a sphere, which is closer to the cube, meaning it's the same thing but smoother.(3 votes) - i jast realised that you can use a coler weel(2 votes)
- When will we learn about HEX?(2 votes)
- Can anyone tell me, What is the involvement of Gamma and Vibrant feature or functionality in RGB color cube or HLS color Cylinder?(1 vote)
- at, why can I see a small ring around the middle? 2:15(1 vote)
Video transcript
- Although RGB triples are great for representing
how we can generate colors, they aren't natural for artists to use. Instead, we use the concept of
hue, saturation and lightness to find the exact color we need. On the hue saturation wheel, the angle around the
circle defines the hue, and the radius defines the saturation. The position in this
circle is then combined with the setting of the Lightness slider to define a final color. From now on I'm gonna
call this Lightness slider the Lightness Dimension, since it only requires a
single number to define, and this color, which is defined
using these HSL settings, is also some position
in the RGB color cube. That brings us to a key
problem in this lesson. How does each HSL setting convert into a unique
point in the RGB cube? First, let's think about
how we can go from a 3D cube to a 2D circle. The trick is to think
about where the grays are in our color cube. Anywhere in our color cube
where the RGB values are equal, we get some shade of gray. For example, 20%, 20%, 20%,
gives us this darker gray, and 80%, 80%, 80%, gives
us this lighter gray. That means there's a line
of gray within our RGB cube, meaning that there's
only one dimension needed to describe all grays. So let's rotate the color cube so that we're looking directly
down at the gray line. Does it look familiar? Mathematicians cheat a bit
and deform this into a circle. There's some fancy math to
make this stretching happen, but we'll ignore it here. And that's where the hue
saturation wheel comes from. Finally, we can get to
the Lightness Dimension. To do this, we pop back into 3D space by growing our circle into a cylinder. The Lightness Dimension defines what slice we take out of our color cylinder. A Lightness value of 50% takes
a slice out of the middle, and to lighten the shade
of any color on this wheel, we're moving up the Lightness
Dimension to a higher slice, and to darken the color, we move down the Lightness
Dimension to a lower slice. Okay, this is important,
so let's pause here. In the next exercise, we'll challenge you to think
about this model a little more. Take your time and have fun.