Erik Kennedy has an interesting hack[1] to naturally darken or lighten any color using the standard HSB color picker. He mimicks how colors generally change when shadows are cast on them in the real world—simply by twisting the Saturation and Brightness knobs in opposite directions.<p>I thought a lot about why that needs to happen. He describes it as an operation that is “adding or subtracting white”. Geometrically, you’re just moving the color closer or further from the white corner of the RGB cube. So I wonder if that maps close enough to moving up-and-down in the CIELAB/UV color spaces, where the Y-axis represents luminance.<p>[1] <a href="https://medium.com/@erikdkennedy/color-in-ui-design-a-practical-framework-e18cacd97f9e" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@erikdkennedy/color-in-ui-design-a-practi...</a>
Also see Okhsv and Okhsl, which is likely an even better color space for color picking.<p><a href="https://bottosson.github.io/posts/colorpicker/" rel="nofollow">https://bottosson.github.io/posts/colorpicker/</a>
While good attempt in 2012, afaik we can do better these days with e.g. ok* family of colorspaces: <a href="https://bottosson.github.io/posts/colorpicker/" rel="nofollow">https://bottosson.github.io/posts/colorpicker/</a> (includes section on hsluv)
LCH [1] is quite similar [2] to HSLuv and already shipped as a CSS color function in Safari (and soon in Chromium).<p>[1] <a href="https://lea.verou.me/2020/04/lch-colors-in-css-what-why-and-how/" rel="nofollow">https://lea.verou.me/2020/04/lch-colors-in-css-what-why-and-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18425916" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18425916</a> similar thread from 3 years ago
What I immediately noticed was how easy it was to read the article’s “dark mode” presentation.<p>Normally with very dark background and white or light gray or yellow text, I quickly develop weird persistent white and black ghost rows which eventually make reading very uncomfortable.<p>Even in ye olde days working on green on black CRTs I was uncomfortable.<p>Somehow the green and purple colors on the dark background are easily readable and leave no temporary burn-in on my eyes. This is amazing and wonderful.
I was considering using HSLUV for the background effect on <a href="https://potato.horse" rel="nofollow">https://potato.horse</a> and documented my progress in this article: <a href="https://sonnet.io/posts/use-rainbow/" rel="nofollow">https://sonnet.io/posts/use-rainbow/</a><p>It's a (very rudimentary) introduction to colour modes.
There is also HPLuv which adds in absolute saturation, albeit at the cost of having even less saturated colors. <a href="https://www.hsluv.org/comparison/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hsluv.org/comparison/</a> would be interesting to see how much saturation changing from sRGB to e.g. DCI-P3 would bring.
I've got an OLED and a some more conventional (I actually forget the tech, haha) monitor. HSLuv example actually looks less uniform on the OLED -- green, cyan, and to a lesser extent blue are notably brighter. Looks good on the conventional monitor, though. I could just be miscalibrated, though, my OLED is pretty cheap.
surprised to see such poor color choice from an article talking about colors. Unless of course you're going for that green tinted matrix vibe. In which case, please carry on...