CIELCHuv color space explorer

The CIELCHuv color space can be rendered here. All colors that are displayable on a typical screen (ie. within sRGB gamut) are drawn with the actual colors. Human-visible colors (ie. within CIE XYZ gamut) are drawn in light grey by default. Invisible or impossible colors are not drawn.

You can use the color picker based on this color space here.

About CIELCHuv

In the CIELCHuv and CIELCHab color spaces, three values or parameters are sufficient to specify any color (that is human-perceivable):

  • Lightness: 0 to 100
  • Chroma: 0 to around 180
  • Hue: 0 to 360 degrees

This is similar to the HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) or HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) color spaces used for color selection in most color pickers. However, in the CIELCH color spaces, the components are designed to correspond to how we perceive colors. For example, as we vary only the hue, the perceived lightness and chroma doesn't change by much. This is not the case in the HSL and HSV systems.

The CIELCHuv and CIELCHab are cylindrical transformations of the more familiar CIELUV and CIELAB color spaces respectively. See a rotating 3D diagrams of the sRGB gamut and the visible gamut here: CIELUV, CIELAB (Wikipedia).

Credits

All color conversions are done using a slightly modified version of boronine's colorspace.js (Github), where the D65 illuminant is used for the conversions.

x/y axis

constant/s

More settings

res

axisScale

plotRange

dotShape

dotScale

Hue circle

More settings

Text

Color
Background

Text

The quick hue-0 fox jumps over the lazy dog. Click to edit this text.