What is this? 014

It is often referred to as a “color picker”.

A standard convention in the Windows operating system is to underline letters to indicate keystrokes that will activate or give focus to an object. For instance, pressing the control key and A will press the “Add to Custom Colors” button.

Saturation and Value

HSV (Hue, Saturation and Value) and RGB (Red, Green, Blue).

A color is represented as a point in 3-dimensional space. The RGB system is a cartesian coordinate system. The HSV system is a cylindrical coordinate system.

Because colors are represented by 3 coordinates, they cannot all be represented in 2 dimensions. The multi-colored square allows for choosing the hue (along the x-axis) and the saturation (along the y-axis). The value (brightness) is then chosen along the gray gradient between white and black.

Humans have three types of photoreceptors in our color vision which are most sensitive to red, green or blue light.

Hypertext Markup Language – the language that webpages are written in

It indicates the code that is used to specify the chosen color on a webpage.

This is the RGB color code in hexadecimal. The # symbol indicates the number is a hexadecimal number.

#ffffff is the hexadecimal code for the color white, which is shown in the rectangle to the left of Hue, Sat and Val. The first 2 digits represent the amount of red, the middle 2 digits represent the amount of green and the last 2 digits represent the amount of blue.

Hexadecimal has 16 digits: 0-9 and then A-F.

Numbers are typically stored in 8-bit bytes. Each bit can have a value of either 0 or 1. Putting 8 bits together gives 2⁸ = 256 combinations, allowing a byte to store a number between 0 and 255.

This hexadecimal number encodes the red, green and blue values of the color. “ff” is in the “red” position, “00” in the “green” position, and “ee” is in the “blue” position.

f is 15 in hexademical. It is the largest digit, analogous to 9 in decimal. Just like 10² = 100 in decimal, 16² = 256. Just like 99 is 100 – 1 in decimal, ff is 256 – 1 in hexadecimal.

Therefore, there is maximum red. There is no green in the color. ee is hexadecimal for 238, not quite maximum blue. So, this color is half-way between red and blue but more reddish. You might expect it to be purple, but it is not.

Understanding that the first two digits represent red, the second two digits represent green and the last two digits represents blue, enables you to adjust the colors.

For instance, if #ff00ee has a little too much blue, you can change the “ee” to “ac”, for instance. This decreases blue from 238 to 172.

If you search for “color picker” using either Google or Bing, it will directly show you an interactive color picker.