RGB and HEX colours

You’re probably aware that when it comes to computers, colours are represented by a series of numbers. In this post, John Espirian explains two of the most common colour systems used on the web.

RGB and HEX are colour systems used on the web

There are lots of colour systems available, but the two mentioned here use the additive colour system. This means they are based on the combination of light, with the primary colours being red, green and blue. In the additive system, red, green and blue together produce white.

For comparison, paints, dyes and inks use the subtractive colour system.

Sticking with the idea of light, imagine that the red, green and blue components are coloured torches pointing at the same spot. But these torches are special: instead of being either on or off, they can be partially on. Consider that the torches have analogue dials rather than on/off buttons.

With this idea in mind, we can move straight on to the two most popular colour systems on the web.

If you already know about RGB colours, take a look at this very useful resource for looking up colour values: rgb.to

RGB colours

Each of the RGB (red, green, blue) system’s three torches has a setting between 0 and 255.

A value of 0 means the torch is off.

A value of 255 means the torch is on and shining at its maximum.

If all the torches are off, there’s no colour at all. This is black:

• R: 0
• G: 0
• B: 0

If all the torches are on and at their maximum, we instead see white:

• R: 255
• G: 255
• B: 255

To save space, we’ll use shorthand to represent some further examples:

• RGB(0, 0, 0) is black
• RGB(255, 0, 0) is red
• RGB(0, 255, 0) is green
• RGB(0, 0, 255) is blue
• RGB(255, 255, 255) is white

To produce other colours, we just need to use different combinations of values. If you’re not used to additive colour, the results might sometimes seem a little counterintuitive. For example, yellow is red plus green: RGB(255, 255, 0).

A visual example should be helpful:

The above examples show our torches either off (0) or on at maximum (255). But any whole number in between these values is also valid. So we could have, say, RGB(213, 82, 7), which has a large red value and smaller green and blue values. This colour looks orange.

HEX colours

HEX colours are exactly the same as RGB, but they’re expressed using hexadecimal (base 16) numbers instead of the decimal (base 10) system we’re more used to.

If you haven’t seen the hexadecimal system of counting before, it boils down to each column of numbers accepting more than 10 possible figures. Instead, we can represent up to 16 figures per column – and that’s done by using some letters as well as our usual numbers.

Here’s how this looks for the 16 numbers between 0 and 15.

If we consider two-digit numbers, base 10 uses a ‘tens’ column and base 16 a ‘sixteens’ column. This means that RGB values can be expressed in fewer characters by using HEX. Here are some examples:

• FF = (16 × 15) + 15 = 255
• F0 = (16 × 15) + 0 = 240
• AB = (16 × 10) + 11 = 171
• 86 = (16 × 8) + 6 = 134

Getting back to colours, we can represent the previous examples as follows:

• #000000 is black
• #FF0000 is red
• #00FF00 is green
• #0000FF is blue
• #FFFFFF is white

Note that in HEX colour notation, we start the sequence of characters with the hash (#) symbol.

As you might be able to tell, the first two characters represent the red, the middle two characters the green, and the final two the blue.

To give one further example, our earlier code RGB(213, 82, 7) can be written in HEX as #D55207. Here it is:

An easy way to look up RGB and HEX colours

Keeping these conventions in mind isn’t always easy. Here’s an excellent resource for looking up RGB and HEX colours:

If you click on any of the colour codes listed above, you’ll be taken to the relevant page on https://rgb.to – neat, eh?

Here’s another good colour resource:

How many colours are there in the RGB and HEX systems?

Each torch’s value must be between 0 and 255, which means 256 possible values. We have 3 torches and must multiply the figures to work out how many possible colours there could be in these systems:

256 × 256 × 256 = 16,777,216

That’s more than 16.7 million colours.

Let’s wrap up

There’s a lot more that could be written about colour, but these basics should help you understand enough about two of the most popular colour systems used on the web.