hue, saturation, brightness
HSB describes a color the way a person would: which color it is, how strong it is, how light it is. That is why the dials in Off Colors are HSB and not RGB — nobody remembers a color as “quite a lot of red, some green, no blue”.
Hue — which color it is
Hue is an angle from 0° to 360° around the color wheel. Red sits at 0°, green near 120°, blue near 225°, and the wheel closes back on red. Because it wraps, the distance between 350° and 10° is twenty degrees, not three hundred and forty — a detail that matters when you score how far off someone was.
Saturation — how much of it there is
Saturation runs 0% to 100%. At zero, hue stops meaning anything: every hue at 0% saturation is the same gray. That is why a near-gray can be scored gently on hue — there is barely a hue there to miss.
Brightness — how much light
Brightness runs 0% to 100%, from black to the fullest version of that color. Drop it far enough and every hue converges on black, the same way every hue converges on gray as saturation falls.
HSB, HSL and HSV
HSB and HSV are the same model with two names — brightness and value. HSL swaps the third axis for lightness, which behaves differently: in HSL, 100% lightness is always white, while in HSB 100% brightness is the most vivid version of the hue. If a color picker’s top-right corner is a vivid color, it is HSB. If it is white, it is HSL.
Why not RGB?
RGB describes how a screen produces a color, not how a person experiences one. Nudging a single RGB channel changes hue, saturation and brightness all at once, so it is nearly useless for describing a remembered color. HSB separates the three questions your memory actually answers separately — and, as the per-channel breakdown in the game shows, fails at separately.
Three dials, five colors, five seconds each. Find out which of the three your memory drops.
Test your color memory- The twelve hue families — ramps and hex codes across the wheel.
- Why color memory fails