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HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL

husl-colors.org

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Re: HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL

#11

Post by Camillo »

jdbernard wrote: post #2

This is just a first impression, so maybe after further reflection it won't be an issue, but: all of the examples of HUSL colors are drab and less interesting than their HSL counterparts. It seems like the benefits of using HUSL (which are still unclear to me) are not worth the cost of being unable to describe vibrant colors. Please tell me why I'm wrong.

The examples on the page are all at the same lightness, so you only see a slice of possible colors. The main point it's trying to show is that HSL's notion of lightness is rather useless. When it's trying to generate some background colors (with a fixed lightness of 60%), note that some of the HSL colors are much brighter than others, to the point that the white text becomes hard to read. By contrast, all of the HUSL colors at 60% are suitable for use as a background under white text. You can press the test buttons again to see more examples.

Re: HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL

#13

Post by ChrisGranger »

aw3c2 wrote: post #4

Ha, is the grey on black explanation too low on contrast or is it just me? :) HUSL rocks, I wish all color pickers had it.

The contrast is a little low for me, but I can still read it fine. I think a lot of the problem might be the amount of ambient light in the reader's room. My room is somewhat dimly lit.

Re: HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL

#14

Post by krick »

Not sure if I actually understand what is it about. I'd like to see HUSL colorpicker beside the rival ones (including HSV) to understand if it's really more useful. Random generated colors are nice indeed, but I'm always having a struggle with defining what I want from random, so I want to neglect this use-case.

I mean, I never can trust any studies that say "70% of respondents told us that these colors have brightness of 60%, although, technically speaking, this color is brighter that that, so it's a property of human eye to perceive these shades brighter than these" for several reasons. I can trust a physical definition of brightness, or as simple definition of color as RGB. There's real meaning to that. But what one actually means, when he says "this color is 60% bright"? It is totally a matter of his learning experience, that made his definition of "bright" to be what it is. If one spends enough time working with RGB, he can guess hex-codes closely enough, for him it would be intuitive, as his mental model of color was developed with RGB as a guide. But I doubt any newcomer can say RGB is "intuitive". Intuitive understanding of any tool comes with real experience of using it. So it's not about how intuitive tool looks, but how effective it is after you learn how to use it.

So, yeah, at a first glance HUSL looks "intuitive", but I cannot say if it's a good thing or a bad one, without actually trying to pick colors using that scheme.

Re: HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL

#15

Post by goblin89 »

krick wrote: post #14

Not sure if I actually understand what is it about. I'd like to see HUSL colorpicker beside the rival ones (including HSV) to understand if it's really more useful. Random generated colors are nice indeed, but I'm always having a struggle with defining what I want from random, so I want to neglect this use-case. I mean, I never can trust any studies that say "70% of respondents told us that these colors have brightne…

This talk introduced me personally to various ‘alternate’ color palettes and why they might be useful (though the talk is more specific to data visualization domain): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjJr8D4Bxjw, Subtleties of Color by Robert Simmon at OpenVis 2014.

Re: HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL

#16

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

tacos wrote: post #6

HSL is bad for this use case that's why we use HSV. The swatches at the bottom of this Wikipedia article show the difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV CIE* gets you more comparative, perceptive uniformity however when picking a color that's almost exactly what you don't care about. Author would benefit from an art class and/or two hours reading the mind-numbing tech documentation around color theory.

HSV and HSL are both pretty bad because they're very simple mappings to RGB.

Re: HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL

#18

Post by lcswi »

mrspeaker wrote: post #7
aw3c2 wrote: post #4

Ha, is the grey on black explanation too low on contrast or is it just me? :) HUSL rocks, I wish all color pickers had it.

I'd love to know this too: almost every article on HN has someone commenting about the contrast on some text. To me the difference between the black and grey is fine, and I wouldn't have even thought about it if you hadn't said anything. I initially figured it was because of the MacBook Pro retina monitor is good, but I hear the same complaints from other people on the same (or similar) set ups. Is it a world of diff…

Lots of things can influence text legibility. Different display characteristics, environmental factors, the font that ends up being rendered, view distance etc.

Re: HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL

#19

Post by nivyed »

Does anyone know why HUSL is based on CIELUV rather than CIELAB?

It seems that, although CIELUV and CIELAB were considered equally good when adopted in 1976, CIELAB has generally been preferred more recently (e.g. for the 1994 and 2000 "Delta E" formulae [1]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_difference#Delta_E

Re: HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL

#20

Post by NHQ »

jdbernard wrote: post #2

This is just a first impression, so maybe after further reflection it won't be an issue, but: all of the examples of HUSL colors are drab and less interesting than their HSL counterparts. It seems like the benefits of using HUSL (which are still unclear to me) are not worth the cost of being unable to describe vibrant colors. Please tell me why I'm wrong.

Those vibrant colors are not gone from the HUSL palette, they are there at the top. But they are not the only colors. There is more variation. The HSL palette is "over saturated" with saturated colors.
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