When choosing colors for a color scheme, the color wheel gives you opportunities to create brighter, lighter, softer, and darker colors by mixing white, black, and gray with the original colors.
HUE (Pure Color)
Hues are important to remember when combining two primary colors to create a secondary color. If you don’t use the hues of the two primary colors you’re mixing together, you won’t generate the hue of the secondary color. This is because a hue has the fewest other colors inside it. By mixing two primary colors that carry other tints, tones, and shades inside them, you’re technically adding more than two colors to the mixture — making your final color dependent on the compatibility of more than two colors.
Tint (Hue + White)
A tint is the opposite of a shade, but people don’t often distinguish between a color’s shade and a color’s
tint. You get a different tint when you add white to a color. So, a color can have a range of both shades and tints.
Tone (Hue + Gray)
A tone is when just a neutral grey has been added to any hue. A neutral grey is when just black and white are mixed and not any other colour. The tone of a colour will reduce its intensity. Toned colours are often considered to be less brilliant, but also more sophisticated and visually pleasing.
Shade (Hue + Black)
You may recognize the term “shade” because it’s used quite often to refer to light and dark versions of the same hue. But actually, a shade is technically the color that you get when you add black to any given hue. The various “shades” just refer to how much black you’re adding.
A tint is the opposite of a shade, but people don’t often distinguish between a color’s shade and a color’s tint. You get a different tint when you add white to a color. So, a color can have a range of both shades and tints.
