A Most Excellent

HSL Color Picker

Created for your enjoyment by Brandon Mathis
Source © 2025 Brandon Mathis |

HSL & HWB: Hue

In both HSL and HWB we can describe and manipulate colors in a very natural way. The hue property ranges from 0 to 360 letting us select our base color. For example, red shows up at 0, yellow at 50, and orange naturally resides between them at 25 degrees.

With the HSL model, a pure red is at hsl(0 100% 50%). In HWB however, a pure red is hwb(0 0 0). Read on to learn the differences beteen these two models.

HSL: Saturation & Luminosity

Saturation is a percentage that describes the amount of hue in our color. Starting with our pure red at hsl(0 100% 50%), as we reduce the saturation our color will become more and more gray. At 0% saturation the hue will not be evident in the color at all, leaving us with a grayscale spectrum. At 100% we will have the full brilliance of the hue availabe to our color mix.

Luminosity is a percentage which allows us to tweak the amount of white or black added to our color mix. Again, given our pure red hsl(0 100% 50%), our luminosity is at 50%. As we reduce the luminosity our color darkens until it becomes black at 0%. As you would expect, when we increase the luminosity our red becomes pink and eventually white at 100% luminosity.

HWB: Whiteness & Blackness

Whiteness, as you‘d expect, ligthens a color as you increase it from 0% to 100%. And as it would follow Blackness adds black to your color. A color with 0% blackness and 100% whiteness will always be white. As you increase the blackness, the color will become more gray. Let‘s look at our pure red again. In HWB it is hwb(0, 0, 0). If we want to make it more pink, we need to add whiteness. If we want to desaturate it a bit we can add some blackness too, which will make it appear more of a smokey pink.

Which to use?

HSL came first to the web, rescuing us from the misery of picking colors in HEX (#c0ff33 anyone?) or RGB. HSL was instantly a better choice and lead me to create this website to help people understand how HSL worked. However, if you‘ve spent much time using graphics applications you may be familiar with HWB‘s cousin HSB. If that is what you‘re used to, HWB will feel very familiar to you. With excellent browser support you will be fine with either choice.

WAIT A MINUTE, Eight Character Hex Colors???

Yea pretty neat huh? It turns out hex colors support alpha. You can even have four character hex colors. Just like #F3A is shorthand for #FF33AA so the color #F3A0 is a transparent pink which expands to #FF33AA00.