Graphic Design Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Graphic Design professionals, students, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I am working on a software project where I need to display only the shades of the primary colors. Using RGB, how would the shades of any color be defined? For example, with higher values of green (255), red and blue has to have values with difference of more than 100(r,b can't be bigger than 155)? (If that made sense).
What is the boundary where the lightest green changes to something else?
Your question makes sense but there's no answer. These are all arbitrary names created by man to help classify spectrums. Green doesn't magically end at point X and start point Y. There's simply put too many factors and human interpretation.
For example, a BBC Documentary came out a while back discussing the Himba Tribe which has far more names for colors than most languages and how it affects their ability to identify colors. I think the BBC has made attempts to block it on YouTube for copyright but you might be able to find it on there. You can certainly find a lot of subsequent articles that regurgitated the report such as NYT: It's Not Easy Seeing Green
The Himba tribe from northern Namibia, for instance, does not classify green and blue separately, the way Westerners do, but it does differentiate among various shades of what we call green. And when tested, members of the tribe, who are likely to have trouble with blue-green distinctions that most Westerners make easily, readily distinguish among greens that tend to look the same to Western eyes.
So you're question can't really have a finite answer.
