In the Create A Color Palette post, I've explained the basics on how you can choose the colors for your palette, but I also stated that you can mess and adjust with hues, saturation and brightness until the color suits your needs, but what does that means?
Well, I'm here to tell you just what are hues, saturation and brightness, and how it can affect your color palette!
Hue
Hue refers to the dominant color family, to put it simply, hue is the main color wheel without any modification, it consists of primary and secondary colors, and usually looks like this
Hue is different from colors, because when you refer to color, it can also have brightness or saturation, while hue is completely neutral of that
Saturation
Saturation is the intensity of a color, high saturation will make a vibrant, vivid color, while low saturation tend to be softer, and in some cases grey-ish
As we can see, the lower the saturation the more muted the color becomes. Pastel colors are usually made by lowering the saturation of a color.
Please note that saturation does not equal lightness, a low saturated color might seem lighter than a high saturated one, but both light and dark color can have high and low saturation. Low saturated color are closer to grey than they are to white.
Brightness
Brightness, or also called Lightness, is the relative lightness of a color, ranging from black to white
The higher the brightness, the closer the color is to white, and the lower the brightness, the closer it is to black
How Does it Affects Your Palette?
To put it simply, different brightness and saturation can affect how people perceive a color, here's an example
Both of these color have the same hue and brightness, just different saturation, and you can already see the difference between the two. The one on the right is a very bright red, meanwhile the one on the left is a soft pink.
This proves that just a little tweaking of one or more of either Hue, Saturation and Brightness can change how colors looks, thus affecting your color palette!
However, you have to be careful, as too much low saturation can be considered dull, and might not interest some people, whilst too much high saturation can be too bright and put off some people, there needs to be a good balance in all, be it saturation or brightness in order to make a good work that will attract people
Brightness can be used to emulate lighting and spotlights in your work, a brighter color in the middle of a neutral to dark colors can be used as a centerpiece, or vice versa
Playing around with hue, brightness and saturation can give a lot of variations to your color palette, as long as you keep it balanced, then it's guaranteed to improve your work!
What do you think? Have you been using hue, saturation and brightness variations in your work? Got any question or topics you want us to cover next time? Let us know in the comments below :)