Every Color System, A to Z

The universal web color standard. Every untagged image, CSS color, and PNG defaults to sRGB. Born to match CRT monitors in 1996 and now the bedrock of the internet.

25% larger gamut than sRGB. Every Apple device since 2016, modern Android flagships, and high-end monitors display P3 natively. The new consumer standard for vibrant screens.

The future of web color. Perceptually uniform — equal numeric steps feel visually equal. Perfect for design systems: generate tonal scales, ensure WCAG compliance, mix colors safely.

OKLCH's sibling — Cartesian instead of polar. Axes a (green↔red) and b (blue↔yellow) mirror human neural opponent channels. Adobe Photoshop uses it for gradient interpolation since 2023.

The industrial standard for color difference. Used in paint, food science, dental materials, and print QC for 50 years. ΔE values quantify 'just noticeable differences' between two colors.

Every color space ever defined converts through XYZ. The 1931 foundation from color-matching experiments. Y channel = luminance. The horseshoe chromaticity diagram lives here.

CSS's original intuitive model — pick a hue (0–360°), set saturation, adjust lightness. Widely used but perceptually unreliable: S=100% L=50% yellow is far brighter than the same settings for blue.

The design tool color picker. Powers Photoshop, Figma, Sketch, Procreate. Value = brightness of the hue at full saturation. Mental model: start vivid, then darken or desaturate.

The most intuitive RGB-based model. Pick a hue, mix in whiteness to lighten or blackness to darken. Smith invented this specifically to fix the confusing saturation axis of HSV/HSL.

The print standard. Subtractive mixing: each ink absorbs its opposite. Black ink (K) added because CMY mixing produces muddy brown, not true black. Every printed page you've read uses CMYK.

The perceptual gold standard. The irregular 'color tree' shaped purely by human perception — no formulas, just empirical observation. USDA adopted it for soil classification in the 1930s.

The universal language of brand color. 2000+ spot colors, each with a precise ink recipe from 14 base inks. Pantone 485 C is the same red at every printer worldwide. The 2022 Adobe dispute turned Pantone-referenced files black.

Created in 1927 with 40 colors, now 2,831. The European standard for traffic signage, industrial machinery, powder coating, and architecture. RAL 1003 = Signal Yellow on every European road sign.

The most common color representation in digital media. JPEG, H.264, H.265, Blu-ray, streaming — all use YCbCr internally. Y=luminance, Cb=blue difference, Cr=red difference.

The 4K/8K container gamut. Primaries sit on the spectral locus (near-monochromatic), covering 75.8% of visible colors. No consumer display fully achieves it yet. The envelope for all HDR mastering.

Hollywood's universal color pipeline. Capture once in ACES, deliver to any display or projection. Used by ILM, Weta, Pixar, Netflix. ACES 2.0 released April 2025.

YCbCr's perceptual upgrade for HDR. Dolby Vision uses ICtCp internally. The I channel achieves 0.998 correlation with perceived brightness (vs 0.819 for Y'CbCr).

Built on Hering's opponent-process theory — how humans actually perceive color, not physics. National standard in Sweden, Norway, Spain, South Africa. The architect's color language.

OKLAB for HDR. Perceptually uniform from 0.0001 to 10,000 cd/m². Uses the PQ transfer function to handle HDR luminance ranges that LAB can't touch.

Models how colors appear under different lighting conditions — not just what they are. Google's Material Design 3 uses HCT (Hue+Chroma from CAM16 + Tone from CIELAB) for its entire color system.