Colour converter
Type a colour in any notation and get every other one, with the sum that produced it. Nothing you choose here leaves your browser — it is worked out on your own device, so there is nothing to send and nothing to log.
Four ways to say the same colour, and one that is not
Hex, RGB, HSL and HSV all describe exactly the same sRGB colour in different words. Nothing is lost going between them beyond rounding, and the rounding is shown. CMYK is the odd one out and gets its own warning below.
HSL and HSV are not the same scale
They share a hue and then part company. Lightness in HSL is the midpoint between the brightest and darkest channel; value in HSV is just the brightest one. So the saturation is measured against a different thing in each, and the same colour has two different saturations:
| #3366cc in HSL | 220°, 60% saturated, 50% light |
|---|---|
| #3366cc in HSV | 220°, 75% saturated, 80% value |
Paste one into a field expecting the other and you get
a real colour that is not the one you meant. It is an easy swap to make:
Python's own colorsys returns them in the order hue,
lightness, saturation, so reading its output as
“H, S, L” quietly exchanges the last two.
#abc is #aabbcc
The three-digit form doubles each digit rather than
padding it — #abc is #aabbcc, not
#0a0b0c. That is why shorthand can only reach 4,096 of the
16.7 million colours a full hex code can.
The CMYK here is arithmetic, not a colour conversion
There is no true RGB to CMYK without a profile. What a press puts on paper depends on the ink, the paper and the press, and that is what an ICC profile describes. The numbers below are the plain formula every other converter uses, and a printer will not match them. If the colour matters, ask whoever is printing it for their profile and convert in something that can apply it.
What it will not do
- It will not name colours. “Cornflower blue” means different things to different people and to different standards.
- It will not go outside sRGB. A wide-gamut photograph holds colours a hex code cannot name, and those are gone before they reach here.
- It will not tell you whether two colours look good together. It will tell you whether text in one can be read on the other — that is the contrast checker.