Friday, August 20, 2010

Colour Orange continued - the artificial Colour Codes

You think colours are a simple subject? Not so! You will see why...

When you have to determine colours it becomes quite complicated after a while. The difficulty starts when you have to identify a colour that comes from natural sources. Perception is often undefinable and depends on adjacent colours.

You would not believe how differential people react to a colour and how they would define it. What is still orange and what is already red, or still yellow? Also it is difficult to find pure colour in natural environments - but let's start with the "easier" ones: the colour codes of the electronic medium - the computer or rather the codes of the HTML language.

The colour range for the orange (in HTML definition) merely consists only of 3 colours - the 4rth does not belong (or rather supported by description) officially to the oranges as you can see from the name:


And here it starts already. Depending on your monitor and its settings these colours will appear differently on your computer.

It is in fact a different hue although at first glance it seems to belong to the same range! But you can check this by looking at your monitor from different angles. Now you see why the determination of a colour is so difficult.

Here is a nice chart of the Basic Oranges:

Basic Oranges

Color Hex Decimal Co# Description
  FF9933 255,153,51 1 Pumpkin
  CC6600 204,102,0 2 Sienna / Orange - brown
  663300 102,51,0 3 Dark Chocolate Brown
  FF6600 255,102,0 4 Orange
  996600 153,102,0 5 Golden Brown
  FF9900 255,153,0 6 Light Orange
  CC9900 204,153,0 7 Mustard seed
  CC6633 204,102,51 8 Brick / Red-brown
  FF7C80 255,124,128 9 Pink
  FF6633 255,102,51 10 Tomato soup
  FFCC66 255,204,102 11 Light mustard
  FFCC99 255,204,153 12 "Flesh"

Now let us find the codes for the following images:



The colour codes are:
You will realize that - what we call orange - already has a different hue from the original pure HTML colour orange - clearly indicated by a different hex code.







In the image above we have 4 different hues of orange - indicated by hex code. The 5th colour, represented through #ee1100 apparently is no orange any more although one might identify this colour as an orange hue without knowing the hex code.

Would you have thought that the same orange hues are included in the images above?


















You see - not a single image contains the pure colour code of orange - all images contain different hues of orange.


(all colour palettes have been created with the Color Palette Generator from DeGraeve.com)
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