COLOR FACT: Colors may appear to change according to their surroundings.
COLOR FACT: Outline a color in black or a darker shade will enhance the enclosed color, giving it clarity and richness.

COLOR: general term for the qualities of hue, intensity, and value observed in pigment or light.

HUE: the name of a color, such as red, blue, green....

CHROMA: intensity, strength, or saturation of color, distinguishing the chromatic colors from black and white.

SATURATION: degree of vividness of a hue from its concentration; used synonymously with chroma.

More Saturation---------Less Saturation

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VALUE: range from light to dark, including white, grays, and black; colors can be evaluated on this scale. Values are often numbered on scales of 0 to 10. In one system 0 - black and 10 - white; another system reverses the designations and has 0 for white and 10 for black. Generally, high values are considered to be light, and low values dark.

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COLOR WHEEL: divided or sectioned circle with colors in a spectrum effect.

Legend: P=Primary S=Secondary T=Tertiary

COLOR TRIAD: three colors spaced an equal distance apart on the color wheel, such as red, yellow & blue or orange, green & purple.

COMPLEMENTARY COLORS: colors directly opposite each other on the color wheel such as blue & orange, red & green, yellow & purple.

SPLIT COMPLEMENT COLORS: use of the colors on each side of a complementary color.

PRIMARY COLORS: (artists) red, yellow, blue (printing inks) magenta, cyan, yellow

SECONDARY COLORS: orange, green and purple, made from mixing the primaries: red and yellow make orange, blue and yellow make green, and red and blue make purple.

TETRADS: color harmonies based on four colors; using every fourth color; the tetrads on the Prang color wheel; yellow-orange, red, blue-purple, and green; orange, red-purple, blue, and yellow-green; red-orange, purple, blue-green, and yellow.

TERTIARY COLORS: in contemporary usage, the intermediate colors are considered tertiaries: yellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-purple, blue-green, and yellow-green; in early color theory, the mixture of the secondary colors created a tertiary, as green mixed with orange, orange mixed with purple, and purple mixed with green

Hue: Undiluted colors. The true colors of the spectrum.
Color: Any color.
Saturation: Brightness of a color.
Value: Lightness and darkness of a color.
Brilliance: Lightness of a color.
Tint: A color with the presence of white. Lighter shade of a color. Pink is a tint of red.
Shade: A color with the presence of black. Darker shade of a color. Navy is a shade of blue.

Tint: Adding white to a color (such as blue) is known as a tint.

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Shade: Adding black to a color (such as blue) is referred to as a shade.

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blending of complementary colors: blue+orange

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blending of complementary colors: red + green

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blending of complementary colors: yellow + purple

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Color:
Technically it's the wavelength of light reflected by something which then enters your eye and is processed by your brain. This means the color is influenced by the light surrounding the item, what the item is made of, the ability of your eye to see and your brain to process color, etc. Which is just a fancy way of saying every person sees every color a bit differently!

Primary Color:

Any one of the several colors which generally cannot be mixed using other colors. One set of primaries is the traditional primary group we're all taught in kindergarten, of red, yellow, and blue, also written as RYB.

Secondary Color:
Those hues produced when two primary colors are mixed. The RYB set of primaries traditionally yield orange, green, and purple. The Printer's Primaries also yield orange, green, and purple, but the colors vary somewhat from the RYB secondaries. The brightest, most vivid green comes from mixing cyan and yellow; most vivid purple from magenta and blue; most vivid orange from red and yellow. Using both sets of primaries in mixing offers the widest range of colors.

Intermediary Colors:
Sometimes called tertiary colors, these are colors formed by mixing a primary with the secondary of that primary and another primary. In other words, if you mix blue with green, you get blue green, an intermediary color.

Hue:

The purest form of a color, with no added black, gray, white, or the color's complement. What we call 'crayon' colors or 'rainbow' colors usually fall in this category, though not all do. Color wheels typically have the hues on the outer edge of the wheel, then add windows to show the colors which result when other hues or colors are mixed with them.
This picture shows the vertical black to white dimension is the lightness or value of a color; the horizontal plane perpendicular to this dimension is the hue of a color; and the lateral distance or radius from the center outwards is the chroma (and approximately the saturation) of a color. Notice that this arrangement allows hues to change gradually from one to the next, but defines chroma and lightness as rulers starting from a definite zero point.
Three values are used to define a color: First is the hue, sometimes called shade, second is the chroma and the third is the lightness.
A color shade may be lighter or darker depending on its lightness. If the chroma of a color is reduced, then this color will be less brilliant (closer to gray). If the saturation is zero then we talk of an achromatic color. Black, white and all of the intermediate shades of gray are achromatic colors, determined by their lightness.

Saturation/Chroma:
The closer a color is to its purest form, the more saturated it is. This is sometimes confused with how dark a color is. A pure yellow is highly saturated, even though it's not dark.
The chroma of the mixture is the distance of the midpoint from the center of the wheel to the circumference: the closer the midpoint is to the center, the duller or grayer the mixture will be. To desaturate a color - add white, gray , black or the complmentary color ( a color directly opposite another on the color wheel.
This is the unavoidable rule of saturation costs in color mixing: the farther apart two colors are on the color circle, and the duller their average chroma, the duller their mixture will be. Saturation cost means that mixed colors will always be less intense than one or both colors they are mixed from: we pay a cost in chroma whenever we create a new color through mixtures.

Value:
The lightness or darkness of a color is its value. This is said to be the first thing a person notices about a given piece, so it's even more important than the color.
A given color may be of:
high value: very light--pure yellow is a high value hue, baby blue is a high value color
low value: very deep or dark--pure purple is a low value hue, maroon is a low value color
medium value: medium in lightness/darkness--pure orange is a medium value hue, rose pink a medium value color.
Perhaps the best way to envision the value of a color is to imagine it photographed in black and white. The closer to white that color would be, the higher its value. The closer to black, the lower its value. High value colors tend to come forward in a piece, while low value colors seem to recede.

Tint:
Any hue mixed with white, commonly called a pastel.

Tone:
Any hue mixed with a gray that is equivalent in value to its complement.

Shade:
Any hue mixed with black.

Neutrals:
Colors which technically aren't colors, such as white, black, and gray, are called neutrals.
Other colors may also be considered neutrals, such as various browns, because they can work as backgrounds to the major colors.

Metamerism:
The phenomenon where two color samples appear to match under one light source, and differ under another. Two such samples are called a metameric pair.