DIMENSIONS OF COLOR

  There are three dimensions to color-hue, value and intensity. This makes color multidimensional-any color appearance can be described in terms of these three dimensions.

  Hue refers to the names of the colors. It is the contrast between redness, blueness and greenness. We most typically think of hues as coming from white light divided into the visible spectrum-red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet or as a "circle of hues" or "color wheel".

  Value refers to the lightness or darkness of a color. It is often related to a gray scale where white is the lightest value followed by a series of grays to black, the darkest value. The hues are located somewhere in between the extremes of white and black in value. A color value scale is a hue mixed with white to form tints and with black to form shades of that hue. Red plus white makes pink. Pink is a tint or light value of the hue red. Red plus black makes brown. Brown is a shade or dark value of the hue red.

  Intensity refers to the purity or impurity of a hue. The more pure hue a given color contains, the more intense it is. Opposing terms used to describe this contrast are intense vs. gray, saturated vs. desaturated or bright vs. dull. When a color is too bright and its intensity needs to be reduced, we will often say,"Gray that color." The most typical ways to gray a color are to add gray (black and white) or by adding some of the complementary color. The complement of a hue is the hue opposite it on the color circle. Red and green, orange and blue, and yellow and violet are examples of complementary colors.

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