Three ways to describe the same color, each suited to a different job. Once you understand how they relate, working with color gets much easier.
HEX, RGB, and HSL are three notations for screen color. A monitor mixes red, green, and blue light to produce every color, so at the lowest level all three formats ultimately describe amounts of red, green, and blue. The difference is how readable and adjustable each one is for humans.
RGB states the intensity of red, green, and blue, each from 0 to 255. RGB(255, 0, 0) is pure red; RGB(0, 0, 0) is black; RGB(255, 255, 255) is white. It is intuitive once you know that higher numbers mean more of that light.
A HEX code like #FF5733 is just RGB written in hexadecimal (base 16). It splits into three pairs — FF (red), 57 (green), 33 (blue) — where each pair ranges from 00 to FF, equal to 0–255 in decimal. HEX is compact and the web standard for CSS. Convert between them with our HEX to RGB converter or RGB to HEX converter.
HSL describes color as hue (an angle on the color wheel, 0–360°), saturation (how vivid), and lightness (how bright). Its superpower is easy adjustment: keep the hue and lower the lightness to make a darker shade, or reduce saturation for a muted version — no guessing at RGB numbers. This makes HSL ideal for building tints, shades, and harmonious palettes.
To translate a color across all three formats at once, use our color converter. To choose a color visually and grab its codes, try the color picker. And when you need fresh inspiration, the random color generator produces colors with their codes ready to copy.
Because hue is an angle, complementary colors (opposite on the wheel) are exactly 180° apart. Take any hue, add 180, and you have its complement — a quick way to find a contrasting accent color.
Published 2026-02-01 · USFreeTools.com Editorial Team