Hex to HSV Color Converter

What this tool does

If you have ever used the colour picker in Photoshop, GIMP, or almost any design app, you have used HSV without necessarily knowing its name. That square of colour with a hue slider beside it is HSV in action. So when you have a hex code and want to work with it inside a tool built around that picker, you need the hex translated into HSV.

That is what this does. You give it a hex code, and it returns the same colour as HSV, three values for hue, saturation, and value, the numbers a picker-style interface understands. Underneath the tool there is a clear explanation of what those values mean and, importantly, how HSV differs from the similar-looking HSL.

How to use it

1. Enter your hex code. Type or paste it in the field, the hash is optional, or choose a colour with the picker.
2. Read the HSV values. The tool gives the hue in degrees and the saturation and value as percentages, immediately.
3. Carry them across. Drop the HSV numbers into your design tool's colour picker, or use them as a base to work from.

The hash is not required and both hex lengths are accepted. If you would rather begin with a colour, set it with the picker and read its HSV values from the result.

How it works

As with most colour-model conversions, the hex code is first translated back into its red, green, and blue components, which is the raw information every model is built from. Those three amounts are then recast as a hue angle, a saturation, and a value. The library doing the work is TinyColor, which converts between hex and HSV reliably in both directions.

No colour is altered along the way. HSV is just another set of coordinates for the same point a hex code already names, so the conversion is a change of description rather than a change of colour. What you gain is a set of numbers shaped around how picker tools let you choose and tune a colour.

What HSV actually is

HSV stands for hue, saturation, and value, and you will sometimes see it written as HSB, where the B for brightness means the same thing as value. Hue is the colour itself, an angle from 0 to 360 degrees around the wheel. Saturation, zero to one hundred percent, is how pure the colour is, from grey up to fully colourful. Value, also zero to one hundred percent, is how bright it is, from black up to the colour at full strength.

The model exists because it matches how people pick colours in software. In a typical picker you choose a hue from a strip, then move around a square that varies saturation along one axis and value along the other. That square is HSV laid out flat, which is why the model feels so natural the moment you see it in a tool: it is built around the act of choosing a colour by eye.

How a hex code becomes HSV

A hex code describes a colour by the light a screen emits, the amounts of red, green, and blue. HSV describes the same colour by qualities you can judge directly: which colour it is, how pure it is, and how bright it is. Both fix the identical colour, just with coordinates suited to different jobs.

Turning one into the other means deriving those qualities from the light amounts. The hex is unpacked into red, green, and blue, and from the largest of those three and the spread between them, the conversion works out the value, the saturation, and the hue. The colour stays exactly as it was; only its description shifts into the form a picker prefers.

Why convert hex to HSV

The most common reason is simply that you are working in a tool whose colour picker speaks HSV. If your starting point is a hex code from a brand guide or a stylesheet, converting it lets you enter the colour precisely into that picker and carry on from there, rather than nudging sliders to guess your way back to it.

It is also a comfortable model for certain adjustments. Because value runs cleanly from black up to the full colour, dialling brightness up or down behaves predictably, which suits work like shading and highlighting. Anyone moving a colour from code into an image editor, or tuning it inside a picker-based interface, will find HSV the format that fits the workflow.

HSV and HSL are not the same

This is the point most worth understanding, because the two models look almost identical and behave differently. Both start with the same hue and saturation, but their third value parts ways. In HSL, the L is lightness, and pushing it to its maximum always gives white, with the pure colour sitting at the halfway mark. In HSV, the V is value, and pushing it to its maximum gives the pure, fully saturated colour, not white.

That difference changes how the numbers behave. A colour at full lightness in HSL is white; a colour at full value in HSV is the brightest version of the colour itself. So the same hex code produces different saturation and brightness numbers in the two systems, and the values are not interchangeable. HSV tends to match image editors and pickers, while HSL appears more often in CSS, so the right one depends on where you are taking the colour. Mixing them up is a common source of colours that come out wrong.

Questions people ask

What does HSV stand for?

Hue, saturation, and value. Hue is the colour as an angle on the wheel, saturation is how pure it is, and value is how bright it is. It is sometimes called HSB, where brightness means the same as value.

What is the difference between HSV and HSL?

They share hue and saturation but differ in the third value. In HSL, maximum lightness is white; in HSV, maximum value is the pure colour. The two sets of numbers are not interchangeable, so it matters which one a tool expects.

Why do colour pickers use HSV?

Because it matches how you choose a colour by eye: a hue slider plus a square that varies saturation and brightness. That square is HSV laid out flat, which makes the model feel natural in a picker.

Do I need the hash in the hex code?

No. The hash is optional and both the full and short hex forms work, so you can paste the code in whatever form you have it.

References

1. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), CSS Color Module Level 4. https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-4/
2. HSL and HSV, the hue-saturation colour models and how they differ. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV
3. TinyColor (Brian Grinstead). Documentation. https://github.com/bgrins/TinyColor