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https://bottosson.github.io/misc/colorpicker/
OKHSL works a lot better than the alternatives. It's really nice!
OKHSV doesn't seem as good, and neither do the other new ones.
My biggest complaint about perceptual colour spaces has been that they make working with colours near gamut boundaries really hard. For example, with #ff0 (yellow) in LCH, you can’t tweak any of the three parameters in either direction without going out of gamut (play with it at https://css.land/lch/ to get a vague idea of what I mean, though it doesn’t handle going out of gamut well). Yet such colours have plenty of practical value, and it’s a shame that many things eschew them because they’ve drunk too much perceptual uniformity kool-aid. Colour palettes often just don’t have any decent yellows at all. (To be sure, you do need to use such colours with care, but to remove them altogether is distressing.) For colour pickers especially, perceptual colour spaces have just been no good, because of their weird shapes and because you’re more likely to want to pick interesting colours nearer gamut bounds.
So I’m really glad to see this, because it’s just what I’ve been grumbling about the absence of. Thank you Björn, I continue to enjoy your work!
Good related reading: https://raphlinus.github.io/color/2021/01/18/oklab-critique.... , with some analysis of various colour spaces of different types, focusing especially on their behaviour in gradients, to do with interpolation. My biggest complaint about perceptual colour spaces has been that they make working with colours near gamut boundaries really hard. For example, with #ff0 (yellow) in LCH, you can’t tweak a…
The only time I think it's really necessary is making color palettes for data visualizations.
Otherwise, if you're e.g. designing a color palette for a webpage, you probably do want some variation in perceived brightness. Heck, I could think of plenty of valid data visualization scenarios where you'd want this.
I'm fascinated by this field - ultimately all 2D color pickers show a slice of a 3D structure and we use one dimension (usually brightness) to navigate through the Z axis of this structure. A while ago I built this experiment to show how true 3D color pickers would work: https://wolframhempel.github.io/skeeem/
I think the real story is subjective, not quantitative. Color pickers: https://bottosson.github.io/misc/colorpicker/ OKHSL works a lot better than the alternatives. It's really nice! OKHSV doesn't seem as good, and neither do the other new ones.
Good related reading: https://raphlinus.github.io/color/2021/01/18/oklab-critique.... , with some analysis of various colour spaces of different types, focusing especially on their behaviour in gradients, to do with interpolation. My biggest complaint about perceptual colour spaces has been that they make working with colours near gamut boundaries really hard. For example, with #ff0 (yellow) in LCH, you can’t tweak a…
IMO perceptual uniformity isn't even necessarily desirable in all (or even most) cases. The only time I think it's really necessary is making color palettes for data visualizations. Otherwise, if you're e.g. designing a color palette for a webpage, you probably do want some variation in perceived brightness. Heck, I could think of plenty of valid data visualization scenarios where you'd want this.
As someone who deals with color pickers a lot, it is just nice to have multiple options. Sometimes I just wanna punch in a hex number, sometimes I want a SV+H square, sometimes HS+V works better, etc.
I see value in having a color picker that allows you to pick colors without changing brightness. E.g. imagine you let users pick colors that should work on a background that you designed. giving them a color wheel that stays perceptually at the same brightness has value here, because no matter which color they choose the brightness-contrast on your background will work.