CMYK Color Shades

This chart shows a list of colors and, for each color, three other colors based on the original color but with higher light values. You can use this chart to set up color schemes.

This chart lists the colors from the color codes chart that have some saturation. (Grey, white, and black have no saturation.)

In this chart, the first column lists the name of the color. The second column lists the color's hue in degrees of the color circle with 0° = red; 120° = green; 240° = blue. The next two columns are the CMYK code for the color and a swatch based on this code (just as shown on the color codes chart.)

The next three pairs of columns show swatches of color based on the original value, but with increasing light based on a step size. The step size of increasing light is meant to give three lighter swatches of the original value. These swatches are calculated to be equidistant from the original light value to a light value of 95%. The value 95% was chosen to be the lightest swatch shown because if you get more above 95% in lightness, you get very light colors that are near white (you'll see in the chart that the upper 95% light value in the right-most column is close to the same value for colors of similar hue.) For colors over 95% in lightness for their original value, an upper limit of 99% was used.

This chart can be used directly to choose a color or as a way to set up color schemes.

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