Convert HSL to CMYK Hue Saturation Lightness ↔ Cyan Magenta Yellow Black Free Online Secure
Type a value in HSL and read it in CMYK at once. The arithmetic happens in your browser, nothing is sent anywhere, and what the conversion depends on is written out below rather than assumed.
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Where these notations come from
Hex and RGB are the same thing written twice. A screen colour is three numbers — how much red, green and blue light to emit — each from 0 to 255, which is one byte; hex simply writes those bytes in base sixteen, so #FF8800 and rgb(255, 136, 0) are the same instruction to the same pixel. HSL was invented because neither is readable by a human: it gives hue as an angle around a colour wheel, with saturation and lightness as percentages, so a designer can make something lighter without recomputing three figures. CMYK belongs to a different world altogether — ink rather than light. It is subtractive, built from four printing plates, and it cannot reach every colour a screen can, because a screen emits light while paper only reflects it.
Where you meet them
Hex is what you type into a stylesheet and what a design tool hands you. RGB appears wherever a colour needs arithmetic — gradients, transparency, code that computes a shade. HSL is what you reach for when adjusting a palette by hand, because the changes you want are usually changes of one of its three numbers. CMYK is what a printer asks for, and converting into it is the moment a design stops being light and becomes ink.
Questions people ask
Why does my CMYK result differ from what my printer gives me?
Because there is no single correct conversion. The arithmetic on this page is the simple, device-independent one, which is the right answer when you need a starting point or a rough equivalent. A print shop converts through a colour profile that accounts for the specific ink, paper and press, and the same RGB colour will produce different CMYK values on glossy stock than on uncoated. For anything that must match, ask the printer for their profile rather than trusting a formula.
Why can't some screen colours be printed?
Because the two cannot reach the same colours. A screen makes colour by adding light and can produce a vivid, saturated cyan or green that ink simply cannot match; paper makes colour by absorbing light, and the brightest it can ever be is the white of the page. The set of colours each can reach is called its gamut, and where they do not overlap, a conversion has to choose the nearest available colour. That is why a bright screen colour often looks slightly dulled in print.
Is the answer exact?
Where both units are defined in terms of one another by whole numbers, yes — the page says so above the figure, and the only rounding is in how many digits are shown. Where the ratio has no finite decimal, the page shows twelve significant digits and says the relation is approximate rather than pretending otherwise.
Does anything I type leave my device?
No. The arithmetic runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded and there is no server to upload it to. Load the page once and it keeps working with the network switched off.