Alright so I made this graph. Note that only the y-axis is relevant; the x-axis does not represent any quantity and only exists for the sake of visual arrangement.
Hue - The “flavour” of a colour; whether a colour is bluish, reddish, tealish, etc
Value - The lightness of a colour. Maximum value is pure white, zero value is pure black.
Chroma - The strength or paleness of a colour. Having no chroma means a colour is black, white, or a shade of grey.
When working with digital colours, it’s good to have an understanding of the properties that different hues have, especially regarding value. A colour system like Photoshop’s HSB picker will tell you that pure blue and pure yellow have the same “Brightness”, but this is of limited use, since that system defines “Brightness” in a numerically-centric way that doesn’t have much to do with the perceptual value of a colour.
Every pixel on your monitor emits some combination of R (red), G (green), and B (blue). The gamut of your monitor represents all the possible colour combinations these components can create. This is an additive system in which the stronger each component is, the lighter the resulting colour is. When all three are emitting maximally, the result is the colour with the highest possible value, pure white (or at least, the purest white your monitor is capable of).
In RGB, colours have the most chroma when one component is maxed out, and one is at zero (the third component can be anywhere inbetween). The plot above shows every possible colour that satisfies this condition, and how light each one is. The larger dots represent the six cardinal hues (red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta). The smaller dots represent the halfway points between those hues.
One can see on this plot that pure blue is much, much darker than pure yellow. Why is this?
The reason is that the R, G, and B components of a colour don’t all contribute equally to its value. G contributes the most, while B contributes the least. This is reflected in the value calculation formula shown above.
Pure blue has only the B component working for it, so it ends up being quite dark. Pure yellow, on the other hand, consists of both the R and G components at their strongest, making it extremely light.
The two most important practical effects of all this are:
Different hues will contribute differently to the light/dark balance of a piece. Keep this in mind when considering how a chosen colour will impact the weight of your composition!
Some hues are simply not available at certain combinations of value/chroma. It is not possible to lighten pure blue without mixing it with white or grey and reducing its chroma. Similarly, it is not possible to darken pure yellow without mixing it with black or grey and reducing its chroma.
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