HSV to Hex Color Converter

What this tool does

HSV is where colours are often chosen and hex is how they usually have to be delivered. You might land on a colour by dragging through a picker, which works in hue, saturation, and value, then find your stylesheet or design file wants it as a hex code like #8E44AD. Turning the HSV value into hex is the step that carries your chosen colour into the format the work expects.

That is what this does. You give it hue, saturation, and value values, and it returns the matching hex code, the same colour packed into a single string ready to paste where you need it. It is quick and exact, taking the colour you settled on in a picker and handing it back in the form the web and most tools rely on.

How to use it

1. Enter your HSV values. Type the hue from 0 to 360 and the saturation and value as percentages, or set a colour with the picker.
2. Read the hex code. Back comes the matching six-character hex code, hash and all, right away.
3. Copy it across. Drop the hex code into your stylesheet or design tool, where it stands in for the HSV colour exactly.

Type the three numbers in, or set a colour with the picker and take its hex code from the result, depending on whether you start from figures or from a colour.

How it works

This conversion has a step in the middle, because a hex code is a compact way of writing red, green, and blue, and HSV is not in those terms yet. The hue, saturation, and value are converted into RGB amounts first, and each amount is then written in hexadecimal to form the six-character code. Both parts are carried out by TinyColor.

It is worth noting that this is a real conversion, not just a change of notation. Rewriting RGB as hex only changes the base of the same numbers, but going from HSV to hex first means translating the perceptual hue, saturation, and value into the screen's red, green, and blue. The result is exact, and it is the true hex form of the colour your HSV values describe.

What a hex code is

A hex colour code is a brief string, generally prefixed with a hash, of six characters, like #8E44AD. The six split into three pairs, one per channel: red first, then green, then blue. Each pair ranges from 00, which is none of that colour, to FF, which is the maximum.

Those characters are hexadecimal, a base of sixteen digits running 0 to 9 and then A to F, which is just a tidy way to fit a number from 0 to 255 into two characters. So behind the odd appearance, a hex code is only the red, green, and blue amounts of a colour in a compact, screen-ready form, which is what lets it slot so easily into stylesheets and markup.

How HSV becomes a hex code

The two describe a colour from different angles. HSV describes it perceptually, as a hue with a saturation and a value, the way a picker presents it while you choose. A hex code describes it for the screen, as red, green, and blue light packed into a short code. Both fix the identical colour, but they are not in the same terms, so a genuine translation is needed.

That translation goes by way of RGB. The HSV values are first rebuilt as red, green, and blue amounts, and each of those is then written as a two-character hexadecimal pair, the three pairs joining behind a hash to form the code. Unlike rewriting RGB as hex, which only changes the base, this conversion crosses from the picker's model into the screen's, then compacts the result. The colour is kept exactly throughout.

Why convert HSV to hex

Mostly it is the web asking. Hex is the common way to write colour in CSS and HTML, and a great deal of design tooling expects it, so a colour chosen in HSV has to become hex before it can be dropped into the place you are building. The conversion is simply that handover.

There is a natural division of labour behind it. HSV is the comfortable model for choosing a colour, since a picker lays its saturation and value out as a square you can drag through, while hex is the comfortable model for storing and sharing one, since it packs the colour into a single token. Converting HSV to hex lets you have both: pick the colour in the model built for picking, then carry it into the compact one the rest of your tools already speak.

Pick in an editor, ship in hex

This pairing is why the conversion comes up so often. When you are choosing a colour, an HSV picker is the place to be, because its layout matches how you hunt for one: slide along the hues, then drag through the square to set how vivid and how bright the colour is. The colour comes together quickly when the controls are shaped around the search.

Once it is chosen, though, hex is the form that travels. It drops cleanly into a stylesheet, sits tidily in a design file, and is the format most tools and teammates expect, all as one compact code. So the everyday rhythm is to pick in an editor and ship in hex, and this tool is the link between the two: choose the colour one way, deliver it the other, with nothing lost in between.

Questions people ask

What is a hex colour code?

A six-character string, usually opening with a hash, that holds a colour's red, green, and blue amounts in hexadecimal. Each pair is one channel, running from 00 for none up to FF for full.

Does HSV convert straight to hex?

Not directly. The HSV values are first turned into RGB, then those are written out in hexadecimal as the hex code. It is a real conversion by way of RGB, not merely a change in how the numbers are written.

Is the conversion exact?

Yes. Translating HSV through RGB to hex preserves the colour exactly, so the hex code you get back is a faithful representation of the HSV value you entered.

Can I still adjust the colour once it is hex?

Hex is awkward to tune by hand. If you want to keep adjusting, work in HSV or another picker-friendly model and convert to hex again, since hex is built for delivery rather than editing.

References

1. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), CSS Color Module Level 4. https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-4/
2. Web colors, hex triplets and how they encode red, green, and blue. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors
3. TinyColor (Brian Grinstead). Documentation. https://github.com/bgrins/TinyColor