Why RGB color lightening loses hue and how HSL or OKLCH fixes it
When developers lighten or darken colors by adjusting RGB channel values, all three channels converge toward 255 or 0, causing the hue to desaturate and producing grey tints or muddy dark shades. This happens because RGB is a hardware model that entangles hue, saturation, and lightness, making it impossible to change brightness without affecting color. Converting a brand color to HSL allows the lightness value to be adjusted independently while hue and saturation remain fixed, keeping all tints and shades visually consistent. However, HSL has its own limitation: human perception of lightness is non-linear, so evenly spaced numeric steps can look uneven, especially in darker ranges. The newer OKLCH color space addresses this by aligning numeric lightness increments with perceptual ones, and is now supported in all modern browsers, making it a strong choice for building design system color scales.
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