Hexadecimal color values

Black and White Color Values - Blue Color Values - Green Color Values - Red Color Values - Red and Blue Combinations - Green and Blue Combinations - Red and Green Combinations

This is a test page to show you the hexadecimal values of colors, the way they should be written in HTML. To use them you must add the symbol # in the beginning. Also note that combinations of colors with numbers consisting of 0, 3 , 6, 9, c, and f are considered "browser safe colors" (216 colors in all).
If you want more information on the subject, look at the bottom of this page.

All numbers are used in pairs. The first pair is the value of red, the second of green and the third of blue. 0 means no color, the lowest number is 01 and the highest is ff.
* If you use a color other than the ones below, like #6a8b52, (which is an olive green hue similar to #669966 below), I suppose you risk having your text difficult to read, because of dithering on some of your viewers screens.
* Dithering is something I remember quite well in the first days of VGA and 16 colors. It shows up, especially in a small screen resolution, as multicolored dots and can be quite unpleasant.
* I have tried the non-safe colors (d4 etc) and with 16 colors they dither or become gray (this happens on most of the safe colors as well) - with 256 colors they don't dither, but the hue is slightly different. On the contrary, most of my images dither a little even in 256 colors.

You can save this file for future reference (save page as .. - no need to save images, these are for the backgrounds only).

Black and White

Blue

Green

Red

Red/Blue Combinations

Green/Blue Combinations

Red/Green Combinations

More Information

There are two ways to think of colors with computers:

The RGB model and the CMYK model

The RGB model

Means Red , Green and Blue and speaks of Light (emission)

The CMYK model

Means Cyan , Magenta , Yellow and Black and speaks about Blocking Light (transmission) as in inks

So the CMYK model is used in printing and the RGB model in display .
It is obvious that, for web pages, we are concerned with the RGB model only.

There are many ways to write the value of a color in RGB. The most usual ones are:

1. Percentage (red 80 %, green 20 %, blue 5 % or: 80-20-05)
   A variation of this (percentages divided by 100) is used by some programs, such as POV Ray or GTK, e.g. the previous example would be: red 0.8, green 0.2, blue 0.05.
2. Values from 0 to 255 (red 100, green 230, blue 15)
3. Hexadecimal values (see below)

The hexadecimal values are actually the same as the ones in #2 above, just expressed in a different way.

The #1 above would be in hex #cc330c (almost the same to #cc3300 in the red green combinations) and #2 would be #64e60f (similar to #66ff00 in red green combinations - slightly darker).

Humans are used to count from one to ten, but computers from one to sixteen (or one to two in other cases). The numbers used in the hexadecimal system are: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, a (for 10), b (for 11), c (for 12), d (for 13), e (for 14), f (for 15), 10 (for 16) and so on.
So the number bb would mean 11 times 16 plus 11 and would be equal to 187. From 00 to ff, there are the numbers 0 to 255, a total of 256, if we include 0.

So, in HTML, we can specify the color of a font or background, by writing the symbol # and three pairs of hexadecimal digits, the first for red, the second two for green and the last two for blue.
The color #0099ff means there is no red, green has a value of 153 /255ths (9X16+9) and blue has a value of 255/255ths. So, we would expect this color to look like a blue with a greenish tinge. You can find this color in the chart above and it looks rather like a sky blue in a bright day.

The values we outlined above, can define a total of over 16 million colors (256 X 256 X 256 =16777216), which is more than enough.

So, theoretically at least, we can use all of the above colors for our web pages. But, the web must be accessible to everyone, including those with older monitors that support less than 16 million colors (true color). There are many monitor color configurations: 16 bit (65536 colors), 8 bit (256 colors), 4 bit (16 colors) and black and white. For some reason, the standard was set some years ago at 256 colors. Of these, about 40 are reserved by the various operating systems or are not rendered by browsers and that leaves 216 colors.
These 216 colors constitute the browser safe palette and are what you saw above.

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