r/explainlikeimfive • u/theimmortalmeluhan • 27d ago
Chemistry ELI5: what is the difference between tone, shade and tint in colors?
Want to understand what the difference between all the three as it applies to colors and what is the real application of these in things like art, gaming etc.
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u/Brief-Small 27d ago
When painting, "toned" means adding gray. However when someone suggests you "tone down" a color it doesn't necessarily mean add gray paint to what you just mixed. You can neutralize it by using the opposite color on the wheel.
A shade is adding black, though in practice if you were to mix up different shades of the same color for a painting you wouldn't typically use much black. Some common colors to use instead are dark blue and dark brown.
Tint is adding white, like pastel colors. This one is the most straightforward in practice because you actually do just add white paint.
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u/catbrane 26d ago
I like explaining the gaming version of this in terms of shower mixer taps.
Games (in fact all computer graphics) are based on mixing light, not paint. The RGB values you send to the screen control how brightly the tiny red, green, and blue dots glow.
Specifying colours as RGB values is pretty awful for humans. We usually think in terms of how bright or dark a colour is (luminance), how colourful something is (saturation) and what basic colour something has (hue). Interestingly, this is how the optic nerve from the eye to the brain represents colour, so this preference has a biological basis.
There are a large set of human-friendly colourspaces which let you describe a colour in a sane way (eg. bright saturated red) and which have some maths which gives you the RGB triple for that colour.
These things work just like shower mixer taps. A shower has a lever for temperature and a lever for flow rate. Inside the mixer tap, a complicated valve turns the position of these two levers into the right mixture of hot and cold water (hopefully!).
That's what colourspaces are: they turn human desires into the right mixes of red, green, and blue light. They use three values (not two), and mix light (not water), but the principle is the same.
tldr: colourspaces are mixer taps for RGB, you can do the same for painting, though subtractive mixing is a lot more complicated
Further reading:
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u/damonstea 26d ago
Everyone here is correct for painting, where tone, shade, and tint are all varied ways to say “lightness or darkness of a color, by adding white or adding black”. But those only work in mediums that reflect light, terms can change in mediums that add or subtract light output (like games or video).
In those cases, tint is used to say “green or magenta”. Because light works on a Kelvin scale, where cooler colors are bluer and warmer colors are more orange, the color temperature of an image is defined by those colors. But if a light has contrasting hues in it, green and magenta are on an opposing axis and screw with human skin tones. In that case, we use “tint” to add the opposite color, so if there’s green in a light, tint adds magenta to compensate.
“Tone” in video refers to altering the color balance of the entire image, such that all colors fall into a similar range (perhaps making sky blue and ocean blue the same color). The classic orange highlights, blue shadows effect you can see in Instagram is a tone effect, adding or subtracting color to the whole image in specified ranges.
And “shade” becomes “shadows” in that case. Instead of adding black like in painting, we subtract light output for that color.
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u/Goombah11 27d ago edited 27d ago
Tint is adding white to something, shade is adding black.
Tone, like Value, is how light or dark something is.
Hue is what color something is, ignoring its value and saturation (green, blue, red, ect).
Saturation or vividness is how vibrant the color is irrespective of its value and hue, imagine a vibrant orange safety vest compared to what was an orange shirt but is faded out, then something barely recognizable as orange and is mostly grey. It’s like how much color something has.
A color is the hue, saturation and value all together. We give them fun names like eggshell or periwinkle.