Color Converter (HEX, RGB, HSL — instant)

Three ways to describe the same color

HEX, RGB, and HSL are three notations for sRGB color. HEX is shorthand for RGB: #FF6B35 means red=255, green=107, blue=53. RGB describes a color by how much red, green, and blue light to mix (0-255 each). HSL re-encodes the same RGB color in terms of hue (which color), saturation (how vivid), and lightness (how bright).

All three are equivalent — you can round-trip without loss. Designers prefer HSL for adjusting tones (raising lightness keeps the hue stable), while developers usually paste HEX from design tools straight into CSS. RGB shows up most often when working with image-processing or canvas APIs.

When to use each

HEX: copy-pasting from designs, Figma exports, brand guidelines, CSS color literals. Concise but opaque to read.

RGB: programmatic color work (canvas, image manipulation), accessibility checks (contrast computations work in linear RGB), and when you want exact integer values to dial in.

HSL: tweaking colors by feel — making 'a slightly more saturated version', 'a darker variant for hover states', or generating a palette by stepping the hue. Far easier to reason about for those tasks than HEX.

What you don't see in this tool

We omit the alpha channel (transparency) for now — but #RRGGBBAA works in all modern browsers if you append two hex digits for opacity (00 = transparent, FF = opaque).

We also don't cover wider color gamuts (P3, Rec.2020, OKLCH). For most web work the sRGB-based HEX/RGB/HSL are the right choice. If you're targeting HDR or wide-gamut displays, look into the CSS Color Module Level 4 syntaxes.