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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

But let's not throw away the baby with the bath water...

A huge value of HSL is being able to verify that you're keeping hue constant. Or, to change hue everywhere slightly (when you decide you want a 214 blue instead of 217).

The second value of HSL is that it's easy to look at a code and understand its brightness and saturation semantically.

But I agree that you absolutely need to manually pick appropriate lightness and saturation values to match what you want perceptually, and that changing lightness often requires changing saturation as well.

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If you want to be able to control hue still, you can use CIE LCH which is comparable to HSL but better matches our colour perception.

Yes, LCH is easier to use for picking colors than other CIELAB color spaces. To try an LCH color picker, you can use http://davidjohnstone.net/pages/lch-lab-colour-gradient-pick... (as linked in another comment).

You can also use the better-implemented color picker for the HSLuv color space at http://www.hsluv.org/. HSLuv is just like LCH except that it stretches the saturated colors for each hue so that any saturation coordinate represents a valid color, unlike LCH’s chroma coordinate. The downside is that the color’s chroma (colorfulness) can change when you drag the hue slider.

> HSLuv is just like LCH

To be clear, HSLuv, is based on CIELCHuv, the cylindrical transformation of CIELUV [0]; the LCH in David Johnstone's colour picker is CIELCHab, the cylindrical transformation of CIELAB [1].

Of course, that doesn't contradict your comment about the pros and cons of HSLuv's "saturation" component.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELUV

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELAB_color_space

“LCH” is just the same as CIELAB, but in polar coordinates.

Prefer CIELAB to CIELUV for this type of use.

Having someone on your team that understands and values this stuff is Priceless to anyone building a user friendly product.

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