- Alright, one of the more labor intensive things
you end up doing in Illustrator, is mixing colors.
And you have a hand full of ways to work.
You can mix your colors using CMYK.
You can make a color using the RGB sliders,
or you can work with my favorite color model,
which is HSB.
And that stands for hue, saturation, and brightness.
And by way of example, consider the color orange.
Let's say you want to mix the brightest orange possible.
Well, if you're looking at your CMYK sliders,
then you want to crank the K value down to zero.
You want to take the Y value all the way up to 100%.
You want to take the C value down to zero.
And then you want to set the magenta value to 50%.
And the reason for 50, is that if you add any more magenta,
you're going to make the color more red.
And if you take away magenta,
you're going to make the color more yellow.
And it's helpful that the sliders preview
the colors you're looking for,
but that's still not necessarily
the friendliest way to work.
Where as, if I go ahead and click on the Flyout Menu icon,
and choose RGB, then what I would want to do
is crank the red value all the way up to 255,
take the blue value down to its absolute minimum of zero,
and then I'd want to split the difference
where the green value is, by taking it to 128.
And again, if I give it any less green,
then the color becomes more red,
and if I give it any more green,
it becomes yellow.
Compare that to HSB, and you get the HSB sliders,
by clicking on that Flyout Menu once again,
and choosing HSB.
And then what we'd want to do
is crank the saturation and brightness values up to 100%,
and set the hue value to 30 degrees.
Now you might look at that and say,
well gosh Deke, I don't know why that's any easier.
These numbers are just as meaningless
as the ones that we saw before.
But the great thing about HSB,
is that it's possible to anticipate
what you're going to get,
once you learn how it works.
And so hue, is the core color.
It's measured in degrees,
as if the colors were wrapped around a circle.
So in another words, you can change that hue value
to anything from zero degrees, which is red,
all the way up to 360 degrees, which is also red.
And that's because the visible color spectrum,
wraps around on to itself.
So as you can see in the circular chart,
a hue value of zero degrees is red,
30 degrees is orange, 60 degrees is yellow,
90 degrees I'm calling lime.
It's in this yellow to green territory.
120 degrees is RGB green,
just full on green and nothing else.
150 degrees, I'm calling it turquoise.
180 degrees is cyan, 210 degrees I'm calling cobalt.
It's a shade of blue obviously.
240 degrees is RGB blue,
so pure blue with no red and no green.
270 degrees is violet, 300 degrees is magenta,
and 330 degrees is somewhere between
magenta and red, and I'm calling it crimson.
In any event, you can see how the colors
wrap around the chart.
We've got the red, green, blue primaries.
It's zero, 120, and 240.
And then we have cyan, magenta, yellow,
at 180, 300, and then 60.
Next, we have saturation,
which controls the intensity of a color,
from its most vivid at 100%,
as we can see around the perimeter of the circle,
to gray or white, at zero percent,
which we're seeing at the center of the circle.
So these are the desaturated colors towards the center.
And then brightness goes from bright color,
that is, whatever color you've mixed
using the hue and saturation values,
or white at 100%, to black at zero percent.
So at zero percent brightness,
it doesn't matter what the hue and saturation values are,
you're going to get black.
Where as if you have the saturation value
cranked up to 100%, and you take the brightness value
up to 100%, you're going to get the most vivid version
of the hue value possible.
So if we were to take the hue value to 30 degrees,
then we'd get a nice vivid orange.
If we were to take it up to 60 degrees,
then we would get a nice vivid yellow.
If you want white, then you just go ahead
and crank the saturation value down to zero percent.
And it doesn't matter what the hue value is,
as long as the saturation is zero and the brightness is 100,
you get white.
And then finally, if you want a stone cold gray,
you would go ahead and take that saturation value
down to zero percent, and then,
you would adjust the brightness value to taste.
And so notice, if I have a saturation of zero percent,
and a brightness of approximately 50% in this case,
then I'm going to get an absolutely medium gray.
Now I will say that HSB provides the most satisfying
color experience, when you're working with an RGB document,
but you can also get great results in CMYK.
And so it's really up to you how you decide
to mix your colors,
but I just wanted you to know about my favorite color model,
which is available in the Color panel Flyout Menu,
which is this guy right there, HSB.