What Is the HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) Color Model?

Anyone with a monitor has probably heard of the RGB color space. If you deal with commercial printers, you know about CMYK, and you may have noticed HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) in the color picker of your graphics software.

Unlike RGB and CMYK, which are defined in relation to primary colors, HSV is defined in a way that is similar to how humans perceive color.

HSV is named as such for three values: hue, saturation, and value.

This color space describes colors (hue or tint) in terms of their shade (saturation or amount of gray) and their brightness value.

Note: Some color pickers (like the one in Adobe Photoshop) use the acronym HSB, which substitutes the term "Brightness" for value, but HSV and HSB are the same color model.

How to Use the HSV Color Model

The HSV color wheel is sometimes depicted as a cone or cylinder, but always with these three components:

Hue

Hue is the color portion of the color model, and is expressed as a number from 0 to 360 degrees:

Color	Angle
Red	0-60
Yellow	60-120
Green	120-180
Cyan	180-240
Blue	240-300
Magenta	300-360

Saturation

Saturation is the amount of gray in the color, from 0 to 100 percent. A faded effect can be had from reducing the saturation toward zero to introduce more gray.

However, saturation is sometimes viewed on a range from just 0-1, where 0 is gray and 1 is a primary color.

Value (or Brightness)

Value works in conjunction with saturation and describes the brightness or intensity of the color, from 0-100 percent, where 0 is completely black and 100 is the brightest and reveals the most color.

How HSV Is Used

The HSV color space is used when selecting colors for paint or ink because HSV better represents how people relate to colors than does the RGB color space.

The HSV color wheel is also used to generate high-quality graphics. Although less well known than its RGB and CMYK cousins, the HSV approach is available in many high-end image editing software programs.

Selecting an HSV color begins with picking one of the available hues, which is how most humans relate to color, and then adjusting the shade and brightness value.