Why HSL Makes Color Palettes Look Uneven and How OKLCH Fixes It
Developer and color tool builder explains why HSL, a widely used color model, produces visually uneven palettes despite its mathematically equal lightness values. The problem lies in HSL's lightness channel being a geometric rather than perceptual measure, causing yellows to appear far brighter than blues at identical settings. OKLCH, a cylindrical form of the OKLab color space, addresses this by modeling human vision, ensuring colors at the same lightness value genuinely appear equally bright across all hues. Modern browsers now natively support the oklch() CSS function, allowing developers to use OKLCH values directly in stylesheets without conversion. The author has built a free palette generator at irrationaltools.com that leverages OKLCH for distinct, sequential, and diverging color schemes suited to data visualization and UI design.
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