About the HSV to Colortone Converter
Choosing a colour on HSV sliders is quick, but the three numbers you end up with are hard to describe to anyone who was not watching. Hue 11, saturation 60, value 89 means nothing in a chat message. Feed those values in here and the answer comes back as a tone name, matched against a 131 entry library, with the original colour and the named tone shown as adjacent swatches so the label can be checked at a glance.
Because the library is organised by how colours look rather than by hue arithmetic, the name you get is not simply the nearest hue on the wheel. A low value with high saturation in the red sector lands on Burgundy or Oxblood rather than a bright red, and washing the saturation out of a green sends the answer towards Sage or Moss. That behaviour follows from measuring the distance in CIE Lab, where lightness and chroma count as much as hue does.
Values may be typed as hsv(11, 60%, 89%), as hsb 11 60 89, or as three bare numbers, and the percent signs are optional. Saturation and value must sit between 0 and 100 while hue wraps around the wheel, so 400 degrees is read as 40. The reverse lookup is Colortone to HSV, and HSV to Pantone answers the same question with a printable spot colour.
How to use
- Copy the three numbers from your HSV or HSB picker.
- Paste them here, one colour per line, with or without the wrapper.
- Press Match and compare the pair of swatches for each row.
- Copy the tone names for your notes.
Common questions
- Do Photoshop HSB numbers work here?
- Yes, HSB and HSV describe the same model, so the three values can be pasted directly from the picker.
- Why did a dark red match Burgundy instead of Crimson?
- Lightness is part of the distance calculation, so a low value pushes the answer towards the deeper names in the library.
- Is a hue above 360 rejected?
- No, the hue wraps around the wheel, so 400 is treated as 40 degrees.
- Can I use a slash between the numbers?
- Yes, commas, spaces and slashes are all accepted as separators.