Interactive Color Wheel

• The Intensity Controls modify color wheel intensity.
• The Rings Controls
  • - and + modify size of color wheel
  • Rings toggles presence of delineating saturation rings
• The CBMR Buttons toggle hue augmentation.
  • C sets 10 or 12 shades of Cyan.
  • B sets 10 or 12 shades of Blue.
  • M sets 10 or 12 shades of Magenta.
  • R sets 10 or 12 shades of Red.
  • Yellow and Green cannot be augmented.
• The Mouse lets you click your color or intensity.
  • Try single-clicking anywhere on the color wheel or color wedge.
  • Double-click center of color wheel to enter "lumaOnly" mode.
  • Double-click elsewhere on color wheel to exit "lumaOnly" mode.
  • Single-click on the saturation "snake" to toggle it between color and grey.
  • Single-click on [luma] text to rotate mode: luma->Luminance->average.
• A log is available in the Java Console of selected RGB, luma, and HSB values.

The secondary colors¹ are cyan, magenta, and yellow (CMY²).  On light-reflecting surfaces (such as books, paintings, and beads), various combinations of the secondaries subtract from the source light to produce the same overall effect.  The physical world may be defined in terms of its impurities.  The paints available to artists are not pure cyan, magenta, and yellow.  Instead an artist has a variety of pigments from which to choose, often based on the color of various metallic oxides.

In the purer digital world, it may be clear why my wheel has its six conical regions.  Each primary and secondary forms its own family of shades.  Observe how the hues slowly and intuitively transition to colors for which we actually have names. Also, observe how the primaries and secondaries are opposite.  Red is opposite cyan, for example.

Take a look at the color intensity wedge on the right.  Did you notice how it tapers near the bottom?  Is your intuition telling you why?  If not, interact with the wedge in the Java applet above.  Click high, then click low, where it is beginning to taper.  Keep an eye on what happens to overall saturation.

¹Art classes often teach about a 12-color wheel.  It names red, yellow, and blue as the "RYB" primaries, and orange, violet, and green as secondaries.  That information is not incorrect; mixing paints as they suggest works.  However, many artists actually working on canvass do not wish to confine themselves to the simplified 12-color context.  For example, Don Jusko's Real Color Wheel (RCW) maps a more complete color wheel, referencing actual pigments.

²You may have seen the acronym CMYK, relating to printing with color.  C, M, and Y you know.  The K is for blacK.  CMY inks by themselves produce a dark murky brown, so professional printers also use black ink where true black is desired.  RGB does not have an equivalent problem.  As light sources, maximal equal levels of red, green, and blue form white, and their total absence form black.

The small pattern in the center is three 3x3 layers of the same colors, but this time organized by hue, saturation, and intensity rather than luma.

It is interesting that the brightest colors are not normally considered the "hottest".  However, since the saturation snake is so unappealingly garish, it defaults to its luma snake form.