what is the difference between Hue and Color?
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Hue is one component of color (or more properly, of human perception of color). It describes, in a sense, “which type” of color a color is. So for example, a light blue and a dark blue might share a hue, but differ in other components of color (like saturation or lightness).
Hue shows up in a couple color systems, but the most common is HSL (which describes colors as a hue, a saturation, and a lightness). Hue is “which” color something is (it’s what’s different between a bright blue and a bright green). Saturation describes “how intense” the color is (it’s what’s different between a very blue blue and a slightly blue grey). And lightness describes where a color is on a scale from black to white (it’s what’s different between a dark blue and a light blue).
(very) amateur photographer here.
Depending on who you talk to, there are only three primary colors. Red, bule and yellow. Some folks consider Green to be a primary as well, but in keeping with the rule(primary colors can’t be achieved by mixing other colors) it is not.
Hues and shades are derived from the mixture of colors (including black and white)
ALL can be considered colors in their own right.
Hue is one part of what can describe a color.
You could loosely say they are synonyms, but when you want to get into the details of specific shade differences, not just the colors in an 8 pack of crayons, you need to describe other factors to a color as well.
Those other factors (when hue is one) being Saturation and Lightness, both measured in percent.
If you describe Hue, Saturation, and Lightness together using numbers, you can point to a very specific color/shade.
Hue is typically measured in degrees. If you lay out colors on a color wheel, 12:00 aka 0/360° is red, then ROYGBIV your way around the circle. So a hue of 270 (West on a compass) is purple. But if you want to describe a color in more detail than “purple” you’ll need to describe how saturated (how not black and white the color is, for lack of a better explanation) and how light it is.
So a hue of 0 is red, but…
>Crimson has a hue angle of 348 degrees, a saturation of 83.3% and a lightness of 47.1%.
Hue and brightness are each one dimensional variables, with color being the 2D combination of them. Hue is where you are on the color wheel from red to yellow to blue. Brightness is how close to white / far from black you are.
Pink and red have the same hue, but different brightnesses. Pink and sky blue have the same brightness but different hues.
Hue is where a color is on a color wheel. Red, green, yellow all have different hues. But color also has brightness (how close to white or black it is) and saturation (how close or far from grey it is).
So you could two very different looking reds that have the same hue but different brightness and saturation, for example.
Two different colors have the same hue, if you can get one by adding black and white colors to another! Black will give you darker color. White – lighter one! Both – less saturated color. But what stays the same is hue.
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