Re:HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL
by jacobolus on Sunday June 14, 2015 @01:30AM
(#9713814)
Someone emailed me recently about a tool he was building using an HUSL-based color picker. Here was part of my response:
As for the color space, I can understand the idea, but personally I think both HuSL and HuSLp are quite far from human friendly in practice, either for manual color selections or programming heuruistic color choices. In the case of HuSL, the numerical values for “saturation” are useless for comparisons across lightnesses or hues, and in the case of HuSLp, the very limited gamut of RGB displays in certain hues ends up leaving the majority of display colors outside of the HuSLp gamut, while still leaving the saturation numbers somewhat useless for comparisons across lightnesses.
I think end users would be better served by just using a cylindrical representation of CIELUV directly (or actually CIELAB, IPT, or CIECAM02 would be better still for most UI purposes I think, even in the context of computer displays, or perhaps NCS for certain use cases). HuSL is better than HSL/HSV, but that’s a very low bar.
As for the color space, I can understand the idea, but personally I think both HuSL and HuSLp are quite far from human friendly in practice, either for manual color selections or programming heuruistic color choices. In the case of HuSL, the numerical values for “saturation” are useless for comparisons across lightnesses or hues, and in the case of HuSLp, the very limited gamut of RGB displays in certain hues ends up leaving the majority of display colors outside of the HuSLp gamut, while still leaving the saturation numbers somewhat useless for comparisons across lightnesses.
I think end users would be better served by just using a cylindrical representation of CIELUV directly (or actually CIELAB, IPT, or CIECAM02 would be better still for most UI purposes I think, even in the context of computer displays, or perhaps NCS for certain use cases). HuSL is better than HSL/HSV, but that’s a very low bar.