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Hexadecimal Colors Explained

The most common way, for web pages, that colors are created is by using hexadecimal characters as representations for the values of the colors. These are essentially "light values", and define the strength or weakness of the absence or presence of light: it all depends on whether or not you're a half-full or half-empty type of person. "00" Represents the darkest of colors, and in itself is black. "FF" is white.

Hexidecimal Colors Explained

Before you can understand Hex colors, you must understand what a Hexadecimal character is, as well as the value or weight it might represent. If you are familiar with root-words: Hex means 6 and Dec means 10. 6 + 10 equals 16. The hexadecimal system has 16 characters: 0123456789ABCDEF. I'm sure you have played poker, solitaire, or another card game before. Letters in the Hex system works just like playing a card game: Letters are worth more: A=10, B=11, C=12, D=13, E=14, F=15. Just in case you are confused, thinking "But if F equals 15, and you said Hex+Dec=16..", you might be forgetting about "0", zero is a number too.

The Hexadecimal Color system could also be explained as being a math system of equating what values equal what colors. Every different 6-character hex combination is a completely different color. Since we are talking about 16 different values that fill 6 different locations, there are 16^6 total combination (16^6 = 16,777,216). As you will learn about "216 Web Safe Colors" below, some monitors or operating systems can only display 216 or 256 colors, some can only display 16,386, some can display the full 16+ million.

Hexadecimal colors consist of 6 characters, 3 sets of 2. Red, Green, and Blue comprise each of the sets. You probably learned that Red, Yellow, and Blue are the three primary colors, when you were younger. Well, that may apply to crayons and paint, but not light. In the internet-hexidecimal-light world, to get "Yellow" without referencing it as "Yellow", you have to mix the strongest Red ("FF"), strongest Green ("FF"), and weakest Blue ("00"). This would be: "FF" + "FF" + "00", or "FFFF00".

There are loads of online hexadecimal reference sites and converters, you can also use an image editing software application to choose your colors. Here at Theme Joomla we also have a few reference charts available from in the "Resource / Release Features" Section from the main menu above, like these 2 articles below:

• Web Named Colors Full Chart
• Web Safe Colors Hexadecimal Base Reference Chart

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