Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 Studio Techniques

Hue = Basic Color

Take another look at Figure 10.1 and you'll notice that only six basic colors are shown: cyan, blue, magenta, red, yellow, and green. That's because every color you could ever imagine is based on one of those colors or what you get in the transition between them. Take red, for example. Darken it and you get maroon, or make it less vivid and you'll have pink. But in the end both are just different versions of red.

The basic color that any color is based on is known as its hue. Photoshop describes these basic colors, or hues, using numbers that it gets by figuring out how many degrees the color is from red going clockwise around a color wheel. If you divide the color wheel into sixths and start with red at 0, then you'll find ...