One Color, Five Formats
Your brand guide says the primary color is #FF5733. The CSS guy needs it in HSL for hover state adjustments. The print vendor wants CMYK. And the developer working on the Android app is asking for RGB values. Same color, four conversations, four different notations.
Paste in any color value, HEX, RGB, HSL, HSV, or CMYK, and the tool auto-detects the format and converts to all the others instantly. One-click copy for each format.
Drop in #FF5733 and you get:
- RGB: rgb(255, 87, 51)
- HSL: hsl(11, 100%, 60%)
- HSV: hsv(11, 80%, 100%)
- CMYK: cmyk(0%, 66%, 80%, 0%)
Why Different Formats Exist
They’re not interchangeable preferences, each format exists because it’s useful in a specific context. HEX is the shorthand web developers have used since the 90s. RGB maps directly to how screens produce color (red, green, blue LEDs). HSL makes intuitive sense for adjustments, change lightness without affecting hue. HSV is what most design tool color pickers use internally. CMYK is how printers mix cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink.
The gap between screen and print is worth understanding. Some vivid screen colors simply can’t be reproduced with ink, the CMYK gamut is smaller than RGB. The conversion gives you the closest approximation, but that neon green on your monitor won’t look the same on a brochure. It’s a physics limitation, not a tool limitation.
Real Workflows
Building a brand style guide. Your designer picked colors in Figma (HEX), but the guide needs to include values for web (HEX/RGB/HSL), print (CMYK), and app development (RGB). Convert once, fill in all the blanks.
CSS adjustments. You’ve got a button color in HEX but you want to make the hover state slightly lighter. Converting to HSL first makes this easy, just bump the lightness value up by 10-15%.
Cross-tool consistency. Photoshop shows HSV, Figma shows HEX, CSS uses RGB for rgba(). Making sure everyone’s looking at the same color means having all the format values handy.
HSL vs. HSV, The Difference
Both use hue and saturation, but the third component differs. In HSL, 50% lightness is the “pure” color, going higher adds white, going lower adds black. In HSV, 100% value is the brightest version. HSL is the one CSS uses. HSV is what Photoshop’s color picker uses. They represent the same colors differently, and converting between them isn’t just swapping labels.
Use the Color Picker for visual selection, the Palette Generator for harmony-based combinations, and the Contrast Checker for accessibility. All conversions run in your browser.