Colours can be described by more than just hue

Many people when asked: “What colour is your new shirt?” will reply “Green!” (if it is a green shirt…)

But what kind of green? Dark green? Pale green? Mint-green? Olive-green?

Describing your shirt only as green does not give the full colour story.

Colour characters

When we describe colours, we often only use simple, single words like green or red or blue, which are examples of hues. We may try to further describe colours by referring to commonly known objects (like olive-green or emerald-green). Colour appearances are complex and have many characters, like pale, dark, muted or vivid. We can use these character descriptions to better describe a colour, compared to only describing its hue.

Colour neighbours

We can also describe a colour by relating it to a neighbouring colour. The scientist Ewald Hering looked carefully at colour’s visual properties, and established four reference colours: Red, Green, Blue and Yellow. Other colours we see can be described or related to these four as reddish, bluish, greenish etc. For example, some greens in the lower hue circle may be described as yellowish-greens, (on the left of the reference green in the image), while others may be described as bluish-greens (on the right of the reference green in the image).

Hue families

A hue circle combined with the colour characters provides a more comprehensive way of describing the colours we see, compared to only describing a colour by its hue. A hue family is a collection of colours with various characters, all having the same hue. A green hue family is shown.

Try this!

Using the colour characters and neighbouring hues, fully describe the colours of the shirts shown in the slide show at the top of this page.

Colour attributes

To completely and best describe a colour, we need to specify all of the colour’s attributes. The simplest way is to describe the hue family and character. Other colour organizing systems use various colour attributes to fully describe a colour. For example:

1. its hue (like green or red or blue or magenta)

2. its lightness/value (which is a measure of how pale or dark a colour appears)

3. its chroma (which relates to how vivid or muted a colour appears)