@thi.ng/color

[!NOTE] This is one of 199 standalone projects, maintained as part of the @thi.ng/umbrella monorepo and anti-framework.

🚀 Please help me to work full-time on these projects by sponsoring me on GitHub. Thank you! ❤️

For the Clojure version, please visit: thi.ng/color-clj

• About
  • Supported color spaces / modes
    • Color creation / conversion
  • Storage & memory mapping
  • Color theme generation
  • Color sorting & distance
    • Sorting memory-mapped colors
  • Gradients
    • Multi-stop gradients in any color space
    • Cosine gradients
  • RGB color transformations
• Status
• Support packages
• Related packages
• Installation
• Dependencies
• Usage examples
• API
• Authors
• License

About

Array-based color types, CSS parsing, conversions, transformations, declarative theme generation, gradients, presets.

Supported color spaces / modes

Fast color model/space conversions (any direction) between (in alphabetical order). All types support an alpha channel, which defaults to 100% opaque (apart from the integer types).

• ABGR (uint32, 0xaabbggrr, aka sRGB(A) as packed int)
• ARGB (uint32, 0xaarrggbb, aka sRGB(A) as packed int)
• CSS (string, hex3/4/6/8, named colors, system colors, rgba(), hsla(), lch(), lab(), etc.)
• HCY (float4, similar to LCH)
• HSI (float4)
• HSL (float4)
• HSV (float4)
• Lab (float4, D50/D65 versions)
• LCH (float4)
• Oklab (float4)
• Oklch (float4) (polar version of oklab)
• RGB (float4, linear)
• sRGB (float4, gamma corrected)
• XYY (float4)
• XYZ (float4, aka CIE 1931, D50/D65 versions)
• YCC (float4, aka YCbCr)

From/To	CSS	HCY	HSI	HSL	HSV	Int	Lab	LCH	Oklab	Oklch	RGB	sRGB	XYY	XYZ	YCC
CSS	✅	🆎	🆎	✅	🆎	✅(1)	✅(4)	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	🆎	🆎	🆎
HCY	🆎	✅	🆎	🆎	🆎	❌	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	✅(2)	✅(2)	🆎	🆎	🆎
HSI	🆎	🆎	✅	🆎	🆎	❌	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	✅(2)	✅(2)	🆎	🆎	🆎
HSL	✅	🆎	🆎	✅	🆎	❌	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	✅(2)	✅(2)	🆎	🆎	🆎
HSV	🆎	🆎	🆎	✅	✅	❌	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	✅(2)	✅(2)	🆎	🆎	🆎
Int	✅	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	❌	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	✅	✅	🆎	🆎
Lab	✅(5)	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	❌	✅(3)	✅	🆎	🆎	✅(3)	🆎	🆎	✅(3)	🆎
LCH	✅(5)	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	❌	✅	✅	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎
Oklab	✅(5)	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	❌	🆎	🆎	✅	✅	✅	🆎	🆎	✅	🆎
Oklch	✅(5)	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	❌	🆎	🆎	✅	✅	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎
RGB	🆎	✅(2)	✅(2)	✅(2)	✅(2)	✅	✅(3)	✅	✅	🆎	✅	✅	🆎	✅(3)	✅(2)
sRGB	✅	✅(2)	✅(2)	✅(2)	✅(2)	✅	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	✅	✅	🆎	🆎	🆎
XYY	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	❌	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	✅	✅	🆎
XYZ	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	❌	✅	🆎	🆎	🆎	✅	🆎	✅	✅(3)	🆎
YCC	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	❌	🆎	🆎	🆎	🆎	✅(2)	🆎	🆎	🆎	✅

• ✅ - direct conversion
• 🆎 - indirect conversion (mostly via RGB/sRGB)
• (1) - only via parseHex()
• (2) - no consideration for linear/gamma encoded RGB/sRGB (see Wikipedia)
• (3) - including D50/D65 illuminant options
• (4) - parsed as Lab w/ D50 illuminant as per CSS Color Module Level 4
• (5) - only if targeting CSS Color Module Level 4 or newer

Color creation / conversion

Each color type provides a factory function to create & convert color instances from other models/spaces. These functions can take the following arguments:

• CSS string
• number (interpreted as packed ARGB int32)
• array of color channel values (used as is)
• scalars (one per channel, alpha optional, always defaults to 1.0)
• color instance (might trigger conversion if needed)

Additionally, an optional target backing buffer, start index and stride can be given. See next section.

Some examples:

import { css, labD50, rgb, srgb } from "@thi.ng/color";

srgb("#ff0")
// $Color { offset: 0, stride: 1, buf: [ 1, 1, 0, 1 ] }

srgb(0x44ffff00)
// $Color { offset: 0, stride: 1, buf: [ 1, 1, 0, 0.26666666666666666 ] }

srgb(1,1,0)
// $Color { offset: 0, stride: 1, buf: [ 1, 1, 0, 1 ] }

srgb([0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4])
// $Color { offset: 0, stride: 1, buf: [ 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 ] }

// convert RGB CSS into Lab (D50)
labD50("#ff0")
// $Color {
//   offset: 0,
//   stride: 1,
//   buf: [ 0.9760712516622824, -0.1575287517691254, 0.9338847788323792, 1 ]
// }

// convert RGB CSS into Lab CSS (CSS Level 4 only)
css(labD50("#ff0"))
// 'lab(97.607% -15.753 93.388)'

// round trip:
// CSS -> sRGB -> lin RGB -> Lab -> lin RGB -> sRGB -> CSS
css(rgb(labD50("#ff0")))
// '#ffff00'

Additionally, colors can be created from black body temperatures (kelvinRgb()) or wavelengths (wavelengthXyz()).

Storage & memory mapping

All color types store their channel values in plain arrays, typed arrays of (mostly) normalized values ([0,1] interval). Where applicable, the hue too is stored in that range (similar to CSS turn units), NOT in degrees. Likewise, luminance is always stored in the [0,1] too, even for Lab, LCH where often the [0,100] range is used instead.

As a fairly unique feature, all color types can be used to provided views of a backing memory buffer (e.g. for WASM/WebGL/WebGPU interop, pixel buffers etc.), incl. support for arbitrary component strides.

The lightweight class wrappers act similarly to the Vec2/3/4 wrappers in @thi.ng/vectors, support striding (for mapped memory views), named channel accessor aliases (in addition to array indexing) and are fully compatible with all vector functions.

import { Hue, css, namedHueRgb, rgb, srgb } from "@thi.ng/color";

const memory = new Float32Array(16);

// create RGBA color views of buffer: num, start index, strides
// here the colors are tightly packed w/o gaps in between
// (by default entire buffer is mapped, last 4 args are optional)
const colors = rgb.mapBuffer(memory, 4, 0, 1, 4);

// manipulating the colors, will directly manipulate the underlying buffer
namedHueRgb(colors[0], Hue.ORANGE);
namedHueRgb(colors[1], Hue.CHARTREUSE);
namedHueRgb(colors[2], Hue.SPRING_GREEN);
namedHueRgb(colors[3], Hue.AZURE);

memory
// Float32Array(16) [ 1, 0.5, 0, 1, 0.5, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0.5, 1, 0, 0.5, 1, 1 ]

css(colors[0])
// '#ff8000'
css(colors[1])
// '#80ff00'
css(colors[2])
// '#00ff80'
css(colors[3])
// '#0080ff'

// use deref() to obtain a packed copy
colors[0].deref()
// [ 1, 0.5, 0, 1 ]

// here we create a *strided* WebGL attrib buffer for 3 points
// each point defines a: 3D position, UV coords and RGB(A) color
const attribs = new Float32Array([
  // pos     uv   color
  0,0,0,     0,0, 0.25,0.5,0,1,
  100,0,0,   1,0, 0.5,0.5,0.25,1,
  100,100,0, 1,1, 0,1,0.5,1,
]);

// create strided view of colors
// 3 items, start index 5, component stride 1, element stride 9
const colors2 = srgb.mapBuffer(attribs, 3, 5, 1, 9);

css(colors2[0])
// '#408000'
css(colors2[1])
// '#808040'
css(colors2[2])
// '#00ff80'

Color theme generation

The package provides several methods for declarative & probabilistic color theme generation. The latter relies on the concept of LCH color ranges, which can be sampled directly and/or mixed with a base color (of any type) to produce randomized variations. Furthermore, multiple such ranges can be combined into a weighted set to define probabilistic color themes.

import {
    COLOR_RANGES,
    colorFromRange,
    colorsFromRange,
    colorsFromTheme,
    hsv,
    lch,
} from "@thi.ng/color";

// single random color drawn from the "bright" color range preset
colorFromRange("bright");
// [ 0.7302125322518669, 0.8519945301256682, 0.8134374983367859, 1 ]

// single random color based on given raw HSV base color and preset
colorFromRange("warm", { base: hsv(0.33, 1, 1) });
// $Color {
//   offset: 0,
//   stride: 1,
//   buf: [ 0.774977122048776, 0.7432832945738063, 0.3186095419992927, 1 ]
// }

// infinite iterator of colors sampled from the preset
// (see table below)
const colors = colorsFromRange("bright");
colors.next();
// {
//   value: [ 0.006959075656347791, 0.8760165887192115, 0.912149937028727, 1 ],
//   done: false
// }

// 10 cool reds, w/ ±10% hue variance
[...colorsFromRange("cool", { num: 10, base: lch(1, 0.8, 0), variance: 0.1 })];

// generate colors based on given (weighted) textual description(s)
// here using named CSS colors, but could also be or typed colors or raw LCH tuples
[
    ...colorsFromTheme(
        [
            ["warm", "goldenrod"],
            ["cool", "springgreen", 0.1],
        ],
        { num: 100, variance: 0.05 }
    ),
];

// theme parts can also be given in the format used internally
// all keys are optional (range, base, weight),
// but at least `range` or `base` must be given...
[
    ...colorsFromTheme(
        [
            { range: "warm", base: "goldenrod" },
            { range: COLOR_RANGES.cool, base: hsv(0, 1, 0.5), weight: 0.1 },
        ],
        { num: 100, variance: 0.05 }
    ),
];

This table below shows three sets of sample swatches for each color range preset and the following color theme (raw samples and chunked & sorted):

• 1/3 goldenrod
• 1/3 turquoise
• 1/3 pink
• 1/6 black
• 1/6 gray
• 1/6 white

ID	100 colors drawn from color range preset
bright
cool
dark
fresh
hard
intense
light
neutral
soft
warm
weak

Full example:

import { colorsFromTheme, swatchesH, type ColorThemePartTuple } from "@thi.ng/color";
import { serialize } from "@thi.ng/hiccup";
import { svg } from "@thi.ng/hiccup-svg";
import { writeFileSync } "node:fs";

// color theme definition using:
// color range preset names, CSS colors and weights
const theme: ColorThemePartTuple[] = [
    ["cool", "goldenrod"],
    ["hard", "hotpink", 0.1],
    ["fresh", "springgreen", 0.1],
];

// generate 200 LCH colors based on above description
const colors = [...colorsFromTheme(theme, { num: 200, variance: 0.05 })];

// create SVG doc of color swatches (hiccup format)
const doc = svg(
    { width: 1000, height: 50, __convert: true },
    swatchesH(colors, 5, 50)
);

// serialize to SVG file
writeFileSync("swatches-ex01.svg", serialize(doc));

Color sorting & distance

The package provides several functions to compute full or channel-wise distances between colors. These functions can also be used for sorting color arrays (see below).

• distChannel - single channel distance only
• distHsv / distHsvSat / distHsvLuma
• distEucledian3 / distEucledian4
• distRgbLuma / distSrgbLuma
• distCIEDE2000
• distCMC

The sort() function can be used to sort an array of colors using arbitrary sort criteria (basically any function which can transform a color into a number). The following comparators are bundled:

• selectChannel(i) - sort by channel
• proximity(target, distFn) - sort by distance to target color using given distance function
• luminance / luminanceRgb / luminanceSrgb etc.

import {
    colorsFromTheme,
    distCIEDE2000,
    lch,
    proximity,
    sort,
    type ColorThemePartTuple,
} from "@thi.ng/color";

// (theme from above example)
const theme: ColorThemePartTuple[] = [
    ["cool", "goldenrod"],
    ["hard", "hotpink", 0.1],
    ["fresh", "springgreen", 0.1],
];

const colors = [...colorsFromTheme(theme, { num: 200, variance: 0.05 })];

sort(colors, proximity(lch("#fff"), distCIEDE2000()));

Sorting memory-mapped colors

Memory mapped colors (e.g. a mapped pixel buffer) can be sorted (in place) via sortMapped(). This function does NOT change the order of elements in the given colors array, BUT instead sorts the apparent order by swapping the contents of the backing memory.

See the pixel sorting example for a concrete use case...

import { css, luminanceSrgb, sortMapped, srgb } from "@thi.ng/color";

// memory buffer of 4 sRGB colors
const buf = new Float32Array([
    0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0.5, 0, 1, 0, 0.25, 0, 1, 0, 0.75, 0, 1,
]);

// map buffer (creates 4 SRGB instances linked to the buffer)
const pix = srgb.mapBuffer(buf);

// display original order
console.log(pix.map((x) => css(x)));
// [ '#00ff00', '#008000', '#004000', '#00bf00' ]

// sort colors (buffer!) by luminance
sortMapped(pix, luminanceSrgb);

// new order
console.log(pix.map((x) => css(x)));
// [ '#004000', '#008000', '#00bf00', '#00ff00' ]

// buffer contents have been re-ordered
console.log(buf);
// Float32Array(16) [
//     0, 0.25, 0, 1,
//     0, 0.5, 0, 1,
//     0, 0.75, 0, 1,
//     0, 1, 0, 1
// ]

Gradients

The package provides several approaches, functions and presets to declaratively define color gradients and then sample them at user-defined resolutions to compute arrays of colors which can then be used for look-up purposes (e.g. mapping data values to colors).

Multi-stop gradients in any color space

The multiColorGradient() function can be used to generate gradients in any color space and gradient stops must be using all the same color type. Colors are pairwise interpolated, and by default, uses generic mix() function which delegates to type specific strategies. See GradientOpts for details.

import { lch, multiColorGradient, swatchesH } from "@thi.ng/color";
import { serialize } from "@thi.ng/hiccup";
import { svg } from "@thi.ng/hiccup-svg";
import { writeFileSync } "node:fs";

const L = 0.8;
const C = 0.8;

const gradient = multiColorGradient({
    num: 100,
    // gradient stops
    stops: [
        [0, lch(L, C, 0)],
        [1 / 3, lch(L, C, 1 / 3)],
        [2 / 3, lch(L, C, 2 / 3)],
        [1, lch(L, 0, 1)],
    ],
    // optionally with easing function
    // easing: (t) => t * t,
});

writeFileSync(
    "lch-gradient.svg",
    serialize(
        svg(
            { width: 500, height: 50, __convert: true },
            swatchesH(gradient, 5, 50)
        )
    )
);

Cosine gradients

• Original article
• Gradient generator

The following presets are bundled (in cosine-gradients.ts):

Preview	Gradient ID
	blue-cyan
	blue-magenta-orange
	blue-white-red
	cyan-magenta
	green-blue-orange
	green-cyan
	green-magenta
	green-red
	heat1
	magenta-green
	orange-blue
	orange-magenta-blue
	purple-orange-cyan
	rainbow1
	rainbow2
	rainbow3
	rainbow4
	red-blue
	yellow-green-blue
	yellow-magenta-cyan
	yellow-purple-magenta
	yellow-red

Two-color cosine gradients

The cosineCoeffs() function can be used to compute the cosine gradient coefficients between 2 start/end colors:

import { css, cosineCoeffs, cosineGradient } from "@thi.ng/color";

// compute gradient coeffs between red / green
console.log(
    cosineGradient(10, cosineCoeffs([1, 0, 1, 1], [0, 1, 0, 1])).map((x) => css(x))
);
// '#ff00ff'
// '#f708f7'
// '#e11ee1'
// '#bf40bf'
// '#966996'
// '#699669'
// '#40bf40'
// '#1ee11e'
// '#08f708'
// '#00ff00'

Multi-stop gradients

The multiCosineGradient() function returns an iterator of raw RGB colors based on given gradient stops. This iterator computes a cosine gradient between each color stop and yields a sequence of RGB values.

import { css, multiCosineGradient, srgb } from "@thi.ng/color";

const gradient = multiCosineGradient({
    num: 10,
    // gradient stops (normalized positions)
    stops: [
        [0.1, [1, 0, 0, 1]],
        [0.5, [0, 1, 0, 1]],
        [0.9, [0, 0, 1, 1]],
    ],
    // optional color transform/coercion
    tx: srgb
});

console.log(gradient);
// [
// 	[1, 0, 0, 1],
// 	[1, 0, 0, 1],
// 	[0.854, 0.146, 0, 1],
// 	[0.5, 0.5, 0, 1],
// 	[0.146, 0.854, 0, 1],
// 	[0, 1, 0, 1],
// 	[0, 0.854, 0.146, 1],
// 	[0, 0.5, 0.5, 1],
// 	[0, 0.146, 0.853, 1],
// 	[0, 0, 1, 1],
// 	[0, 0, 1, 1]
// ]

// convert to CSS
console.log(gradient.map((x) => css(x)));
// [
//   "#ff0000",
//   "#ff0000",
//   "#da2500",
//   "#807f00",
//   "#25da00",
//   "#00ff00",
//   "#00da25",
//   "#00807f",
//   "#0025da",
//   "#0000ff",
//   "#0000ff",
// ]

RGB color transformations

RGB color matrix transformations, including parametric preset transforms:

• brightness
• contrast
• exposure
• saturation (luminance aware)
• hue rotation
• color temperature (warm / cold)
• sepia (w/ fade amount)
• tint (green / magenta)
• grayscale (luminance aware)
• subtraction/inversion (also available as non-matrix op)
• luminance to alpha

Transformation matrices can be combined using matrix multiplication / concatenation (see concat()) for more efficient application.

Status

STABLE - used in production

Search or submit any issues for this package

Support packages

• @thi.ng/color-palettes - Collection of 200+ image based color themes & composable theme query filters

Related packages

• @thi.ng/pixel - Typedarray integer & float pixel buffers w/ customizable formats, blitting, drawing, convolution
• @thi.ng/vectors - Optimized 2d/3d/4d and arbitrary length vector operations, support for memory mapping/layouts

Installation

yarn add @thi.ng/color

ESM import:

import * as color from "@thi.ng/color";

Browser ESM import:

<script type="module" src="https://esm.run/@thi.ng/color"></script>

JSDelivr documentation

For Node.js REPL:

const color = await import("@thi.ng/color");

Package sizes (brotli'd, pre-treeshake): ESM: 15.79 KB

Dependencies

• @thi.ng/api
• @thi.ng/arrays
• @thi.ng/binary
• @thi.ng/checks
• @thi.ng/compare
• @thi.ng/compose
• @thi.ng/defmulti
• @thi.ng/errors
• @thi.ng/math
• @thi.ng/random
• @thi.ng/strings
• @thi.ng/transducers
• @thi.ng/vectors

Note: @thi.ng/api is in most cases a type-only import (not used at runtime)

Usage examples

27 projects in this repo's /examples directory are using this package:

Screenshot	Description	Live demo	Source
	Basic 2D boid simulation and spatial indexing neighbor lookups	Demo	Source
	Tool to interactively compute & visualize color contrasts against WCAG threshold	Demo	Source
	Probabilistic color theme generator	Demo	Source
	Heatmap visualization of this mono-repo's commits		Source
	Color palette generation via dominant color extraction from uploaded images	Demo	Source
	Fiber-based cooperative multitasking basics	Demo	Source
	Shape conversions & operations using polygons with holes	Demo	Source
	Piechart visualization of CSV data	Demo	Source
	Iterating the unique edges of a tessellation	Demo	Source
	Augmenting thi.ng/geom shapes for WebGL, using instancing & attribute buffers	Demo	Source
	Converting thi.ng/geom shape types for WebGL	Demo	Source
	Visualization of different grid iterator strategies	Demo	Source
	Various hdom-canvas shape drawing examples & SVG conversion / export	Demo	Source
	Basic hiccup-based canvas drawing	Demo	Source
	k-means clustering visualization	Demo	Source
	Matrix-based image color adjustments	Demo	Source
	Randomized 4-point 2D color gradient image generator	Demo	Source
	Image dithering and remapping using indexed palettes	Demo	Source
	Interactive pixel sorting tool using thi.ng/color & thi.ng/pixel	Demo	Source
	Animated, iterative polygon subdivisions & visualization	Demo	Source
	Animated SVG elements with reactive attributes	Demo	Source
	Fork-join worker-based raymarch renderer (JS/CPU only)	Demo	Source
	Fitting, transforming & plotting 10k data points per frame using SIMD	Demo	Source
	Responsive & reactively computed stacked column layout	Demo	Source
	Multi-layer vectorization & dithering of bitmap images	Demo	Source
	Interactive ridge-line plot	Demo	Source
	Interactively drawing to & reading from a WebGL offscreen render texture	Demo	Source

API

Generated API docs

Authors

• Karsten Schmidt

If this project contributes to an academic publication, please cite it as:

@misc{thing-color,
  title = "@thi.ng/color",
  author = "Karsten Schmidt",
  note = "https://thi.ng/color",
  year = 2016
}

License

© 2016 - 2024 Karsten Schmidt // Apache License 2.0