color theory Color theory, or more specifically traditional color theory, is a historical body of knowledge describing the behavior of colors, namely in color mixing, color contrast effects, color harmony, color schemes and color symbolism. Modern color th ...

, a tint is a mixture of a color with

white White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no chroma). It is the color of objects such as snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully (or almost fully) reflect and scatter all the visible wa ...

, which increases

lightness Lightness is a visual perception of the luminance (L) of an object. It is often judged relative to a similarly lit object. In colorimetry and color appearance models, lightness is a prediction of how an illuminated color will appear to a stand ...

, while a shade is a mixture with

black Black is a color that results from the absence or complete absorption of visible light. It is an achromatic color, without chroma, like white and grey. It is often used symbolically or figuratively to represent darkness.Eva Heller, ''P ...

, which increases

darkness Darkness is the condition resulting from a lack of illumination, or an absence of visible light. Human vision is unable to distinguish colors in conditions of very low luminance because the hue-sensitive photoreceptor cells on the retina a ...

. A tone is produced either by mixing a color with

gray Grey (more frequent in British English) or gray (more frequent in American English) is an intermediate color between black and white. It is a neutral or achromatic color, meaning that it has no chroma. It is the color of a cloud-covered s ...

, or by both tinting and shading. Mixing a color with any

neutral color Neutral or neutrality may refer to: Mathematics and natural science Biology * Neutral organisms, in ecology, those that obey the unified neutral theory of biodiversity Chemistry and physics * Neutralization (chemistry), a chemical reaction in ...

(black, gray, and white) reduces the chroma, or

colorfulness Colorfulness, chroma and saturation are attributes of perceived color relating to chromatic intensity. As defined formally by the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) they respectively describe three different aspects of chromatic ...

, while the perceived

hue In color theory, hue is one of the properties (called color appearance parameters) of a color, defined in the CIECAM02 model as "the degree to which a stimulus can be described as similar to or different from stimuli that are described as ...

can be affected slightly (see

Abney effect The Abney effect or the purity-on-hue effect is the perception, perceived hue shift that occurs when white light is additive color, added to a spectral color, monochromatic light source. The addition of white light will cause a desaturation of th ...

and Bezold-Brücke shift). In the

graphic arts A category of fine art, graphic art covers a broad range of visual artistic expression, typically two-dimensional graphics, i.e. produced on a flat surface,printmaking Printmaking is the process of creating work of art, artworks by printing, normally on paper, but also on fabric, wood, metal, and other surfaces. "Traditional printmaking" normally covers only the process of creating prints using a hand proces ...

and

drawing Drawing is a Visual arts, visual art that uses an instrument to mark paper or another two-dimensional surface, or a digital representation of such. Traditionally, the instruments used to make a drawing include pencils, crayons, and ink pens, some ...

, "tone" has a different meaning, referring to areas of continuous color, produced by various means, as opposed to the linear marks made by an

engraved Engraving is the practice of incising a design on a hard, usually flat surface by cutting grooves into it with a burin. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an inta ...

or drawn line. In common language, the term ''shade'' can be generalized to encompass any varieties of a particular color, whether technically they are shades, tints, tones, or slightly different hues. Meanwhile, the term ''tint'' can be generalized to refer to any lighter or darker variation of a color (e.g. " tinted windows"). When mixing colored light (additive color models), the achromatic mixture of spectrally balanced red, green, and blue (RGB) is always white, not gray or black. In colorants, such as the

pigment A pigment is a powder used to add or alter color or change visual appearance. Pigments are completely or nearly solubility, insoluble and reactivity (chemistry), chemically unreactive in water or another medium; in contrast, dyes are colored sub ...

s in

paint Paint is a material or mixture that, when applied to a solid material and allowed to dry, adds a film-like layer. As art, this is used to create an image or images known as a painting. Paint can be made in many colors and types. Most paints are ...

mixtures, a balanced mixture a complementaries, or a balanced mixture of three or more colors, will result in a color that is darker and lower in chroma and saturation, than the parent colors. This moves the mixed color toward a neutral color—a gray or near-black. The Color Triangle depicting tint, shade, and tone was proposed in 1937 by

Faber Birren Faber Birren (11 September 1900 – 30 December 1988) was an American writer and consultant on color and color theory. Life Faber Birren was born in Chicago, Illinois on 11 September 1900, the son of Joseph P. Birren, a landscape painter, and C ...

.Birren, Faber (1937). Functional Color. New York: The Crimson Press. p. Plate 1. ISBN 978-1162978840

In art

It is common among some artistic painters to darken a paint color by adding black paint—producing colors called ''shades''—or to lighten a color by adding white—producing colors called ''tints''. However, this is not always the best way for representational painting, since one result is for colors to also shift in their hues. For instance, darkening a color by adding black can cause hue shifts towards

rose A rose is either a woody perennial plant, perennial flowering plant of the genus ''Rosa'' (), in the family Rosaceae (), or the flower it bears. There are over three hundred Rose species, species and Garden roses, tens of thousands of cultivar ...

green Green is the color between cyan and yellow on the visible spectrum. It is evoked by light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 495570 nm. In subtractive color systems, used in painting and color printing, it is created by a com ...

(see Bezold-Brücke shift). Lightening a color by adding white can cause even more noticeable hue shifts (see

). Another practice when darkening a color is to use its opposite, or complementary, color (e.g. violet-purple added to yellowish-green) in order to neutralize it. When lightening a color this hue shift can be corrected with the addition of a small amount of an adjacent color to bring the hue of the mixture back in line with the parent color (e.g. adding a small amount of orange to a mixture of red and white will correct the shift of this mixture towards pink, that is, it will correct the Abney effect). HSLSphere

References

{{Color topics Color

In art

See also

References