Intuitive way of understanding hexadecimal html color codes?

Question

Is there an intuitive way, or a good mnemonic, for understanding the correspondence between colors and their hexadecimal values?

Mollee

Answer 1

You just have to remember that the scale is 00 (no color effect) through FF (full color effect) and the three parts of the triplet are red, green and blue.

000000 is black (i.e., no color) and FFFFFF is white (mixing all three primary colors).

The hard bit is remembering the mixtures, which I use the following mnemonics for:

• Really good yams: Red + Green = Yellow (potatoes are my favorite food).
• Really bad prunes: Red + Blue = Purple (I really hate prunes).
• Good/bad apples: Green + Blue = Aqua (I'm indifferent about apples).

Obviously, you may have to come up with your own mnemonics if you food tastes differ from mine. But I find that's the easiest way for me.

Then it's just a matter of varying the quantities to add a little more red or little less blue and so on. I generally only use values of 00, 40, 80, C0 and FF since that gives you a 125-color palette to choose from and I don't want an abundance of choices to slow me down.

Marjie

Since I still remember the really bad prunes one, I think this gets a green checkmark. Although prunes are delicious. – Mollee

abcdef is an easy to remember yet cute shade of light blue :) – Sain

Answer 2

You need to get your head around three distinct things here.

1. Reading and writing numbers in hexadecimal. This just takes practice and familiarizing yourself with it. Color codes range from 00 (zero) through FF (= 255), so spend a little time (using calc.exe in Scientific mode, maybe?) picking a number and trying to guess what it'll be in hex, and vice versa. Counting in decimal is probably second nature to you; counting in hex is the same concept, with different symbols and rules.

2. How to read an RGB colour code as three component values. RGB codes are either written as three digits (#FFF) or six (#FFFFFF). In the first case, each digit is a single colour component; red, green, then blue. 0 = empty, F = 'full' (maximum). The second is the same but the additional digit gives you a much wider range of tones because you have 256 possible intensities for each component instead of 16.

3. Knowing the RGB colour model. Your primary colours are red, green and blue. Your secondary colours are yellow (R+G), magenta (R+B) and cyan (G+B). Increasing all the values makes the colour lighter; decreasing them all makes it darker. Pure greyscales will have three equal components - e.g. #ddd, #222. Tint greys by nudging one of the colour values up a bit - #866 will give you a dark grey with a hint of red. This bit you just have to learn through experience. Play with it. Get a tool like Instant Eyedropper and use it to find the hex values of known colours.

Getting it exactly right is very, very hard, but it won't take more than a couple of days before you can say "right... I want orange, which is somewhere between red (#F00) and yellow (#FF0) on the colour wheel, so let's try splitting the difference and use #F90... hmm, bit dark, so let's nudge the G and B components up a bit... #FA2... got it!"

Infante

Thanks for that. But how is Yellow "R+G"? Isn't that Brown? And more importantly, isn't Yellow a primary or basic colour? – Idol

@Idol - when you're working with RGB values, you're not mixing paint, you're mixing light - and it works very differently. Technically, mixing light is known as additive colour mixing (starting from black and adding lightness), and mixing paint is subtractive colour mixing (starting from white and tinting towards darker shades). And yes, red plus green makes yellow - surprised the hell out of me too, but that's just how it works. You'll get used to it. – Infante

Answer 3

Just think of it as mixing paint.

There are the three components RR, GG, BB, (RRGGBB) which can be mixed with different strengths. Remember that 00 is lowest strength, and ff is highest.

For example, we know that 000000 will be low strength on all colors and will be black. Likewise, ffffff is highest on all three color components, and will be white.

You can add or remove color by making one part stronger or weaker. For example, start with black 000000, and add a little red as 330000, or add a little blue with 000033. Add both and see what happens 330033.

Add a LOT of red, with ff0000. Or add a medium amount of green for 006600.

If all three components are close to the same strength, they cancel each other out and you have grayscale, which will be light or dark depending on the strength of the colors. So 000000, 333333, 666666, 999999, and ffffff are black, dark greys, ligher grays, and white.

If you take a medium gray, and add a little blue, you end up with a bluish grey, like 888899. Red, green, and blue almost equal, so almost grey, but with a bit more blue. You can experiment with them a bit.

One really great tool for viewing color codes is this (small and free):

http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.html

Hope that helps!

Dendroid

DON'T think of it as mixing paint! Paint is a pigment-based medium, where the colors reflected are mixed according to a subtractive principle: The more pigment you have the more light is absorbed i.e. less is reflected. Also pigment has yellow, rather than green as the second primary: Red + Green pigment makes brown. Red + Green light makes yellow. You're right about grayscale - if all three components are the same you have a gray tone, but that doesn't mean that all six digits must be identical. The following are all examples of pure gray tones: 121212 0f0f0f 9e9e9e – Kellam

Answer 4

I'm not sure what you mean, but I always remember that it is an RGB colour: The first two digits are for red, the second pair is for green and the las ones are for blue.

like this: #RRGGBB

And of course trying to remember that lower numbers give darker coulours.

If you are looking for some way to remember the colour code for orange, I'm afraid you are out of luck. I always need to look that one up...

Tillandsia

Oh orange is easy...try #F60! ;-) Sticks in my mind for some reason. – Ajit

Hm, maybe someone should sell oranges under the brand name F60 - that would certainly help me! – Tillandsia

Answer 5

Hexadecimal colours are of the form #RRGGBB where RR is red, GG is green and BB is blue. Since they're hexadecimal they range from 00-FF. It should be fairly easy from that to gauge roughly what kind of colour you're dealing with for example #FF12A3 is going to be fairly red.

Conjugated

so say youre working from 0-256, what do the lows and highs correspond to, and is there a way of remembering and testing intermediate points, as they might apply to commonly used colors? – Mollee

00 is 0, 80 is 128 (halfway), FF is 256. Keep in mind every time you reset the right digit to 0 you've incremented by 16. That should be some help anyway! – Conjugated

FF is 255 sorry, and 7F is halfway (127)! – Conjugated

I always try to shorten my tags if possible, #F00 for example, because it's slightly easier to understand ;) F = full 0 = empty – Harvester

Answer 6

Break the colour up into a triplet of values that represent red, green and blue. The higher the hex value in each segment then the more of that colour there is. So #000000 is black, #FF0000 is all red, #FF00FF is purple etc.

Ajit

Answer 7

I think it's useful to get a good HTML color chart and keep it by your desk. I like the Visibone mouse pads and posters.

Lair

Answer 8

Remember:

1) The order of the hex-pairs are Red, Green and Blue. This is easy to remember since we aften talk about RGB-color, RGB screens and so on.

2) The numbers should interpreted as the amount of light in the color. So 00 is no light, while FF is maximum light in that color.

3) I all three colors are of the same level, they "cancel each other out", so we get a greyscale color. 00 is minimum light, så if all three colors are 00 we get no light - ie. black. If all three colors are max-light (#FFFFFF) we get white, Any number in between is grey.

Consultative

Answer 9

Well, monitors use an 'RGB' colorscheme. The order of the colors in the hexadecimal number is RRGGBB. So just remembering the name of the colorscheme tells you what goes where. Then you can parse the #RRGGBB as three numbers RR, GG and BB.

The higher the number the brighter that particular component.

Then you just need to remember the additive color wheel from grade school. ;)

Absolve

Answer 10

I manage to create colors intuitively now (with some trial and error, of course), having practiced them a lot. Playing/using color mixers (with red/green/blue sliders for example) helps in understanding relationships. Now, I know that FFFF00 is yellow, FF00FF is magenta, 00FFFF is cyan, plus of course primary colors, and all others colors are in between.

Seawards