Color Systems

a simple XHTML document

A <color> is either a keyword or a numerical RGB specification.

Additive Color Mixing (RGB) and Subtractive Color Mixing (RYB or CMYK system)

• Additive Color Mixing describes how the eye interprets light to percive color. As colors are combined, the wavelengths and luminosity (brightness) are added together.
• The 3 primary colors of light are RGB. They combine to form 3 secondary colors.
　

To make the above colors lighter, add in other colors to move to white (100% of each color). To make the colors darker, lower the values toward 0 to move to black.

24-bit Color System

• Each color is represented by a 8-bit-byte. Therefore, for each color there are 2⁸ = 256 combinations or values.
• With 3 composite colors, each color is therefore made up of 24 bits. Thus the 24-bit color system.
　
• Each color can have 256 combinations. With 3 composite colors, there are 256 × 256 × 256 or more than 16 million colors.
• Jemima's Chevron : 4096 Color Wheel
• In hexadecimal form, the 216 web-safe colors are composed of three pairs of identical hexadecimal digits selected from 00, 33, 66, 99, cc, and ff. This palette is limited to 6 shades of each of red, green and blue. Thus there are 6 × 6 × 6 = 216 colors.
• The web-smart colors are those 4096 colors composed of any three pairs of identical hexadeximal digits (0-9 and a-f), such as #dd1188. This may be abbreviated to #d18. Thus there are 16 × 16 × 16 = 4096 colors.

Water Colors : a comprehensive resource for watercolor painters on the Internet. Click color vision and then additive & subtractive color mixing

Color Theory for Web Designers.

Color Codes Matching Chart HTML (Convert CMYK, RGB Hex)

10-top-sites-for-colour-lovers-inspiration-palettes-tools-and-other-color-resources

Color Chart

This chart shows the hexidemical value of 512 commonly used colors




Return to top.

Hexadecimal	Decimal	%	Hexadecimal	Decimal
00	00	0	000000	0
0f	15	5.88(1/17)	0000FF	255
33	51	20	00FF00	65280
66	102	40	00FFFF	65535
99	153	60	FF0000	16711680
cc	204	80	FF00FF	16711935
f0	240	94.12(16/17}	FFFF00	16776960
ff	255	100	FFFFFF	16777215

Return to top.

Certain colors always display properly on any monitor. These colors are called browser-safe colors. They are easy to remember because their values stay consistent : use any combination of the following :

Hexadecimal	Decimal	%
00	00	0
33	51	20
66	102	40
99	153	60
cc	204	80
ff	255	100

Return to top.

Only 16 color names are supported by the W3C HTML 4.0 standard (aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white, and yellow). They are as follows :

000000	0000BB	00GG00	00GGBB	RR0000	RR00BB	RRGG00	RRGGBB
坤八	艮七	坎六	巽五	震四	離三	兑二	乾一
BLACK	BLUE	LIME	AQUA(CYAN)	RED	FUCHSIA(MAGENTA)	YELLOW	WHITE
000000	000080	008000	008080	800000	800080	808000	c0c0c0
BLACK 000000	NAVY	GREEN	TEAL	MAROON	PURPLE	OLIVE	SILVER
000000	000080	008000	008080	800000	800080	808000	808080
BLACK	NAVY	GREEN	TEAL	MAROON	PURPLE	OLIVE	GRAY