Color Tools
Convert colors between HEX, RGB and HSL with a live preview — the quick way to grab the exact value you need for CSS and design.
About Color Tools
Color tools solve a small but constant problem: the value you have is not in the format you need. A brand guide gives you a hex code, a design file reports RGB, a CSS variable wants HSL, and somewhere in the middle you have to convert. This category has four tools for exactly that — the HEX to RGB converter for the single most common conversion, the broader color converter for moving between formats, the color contrast checker for accessibility, and the color shades generator for building out a palette. They are aimed at front-end developers, designers and anyone assembling a stylesheet or a slide deck.
Choosing between them is straightforward. If you have one value and need another, use HEX to RGB when that is the exact direction you want, or the general color converter when you are going the other way or need HSL. HSL is worth learning here, because it is the format that makes a color easy to reason about: hue tells you which color it is, and adjusting lightness alone gives you a consistent set of tints and shades. When you need a whole range rather than one value — a hover state, a disabled state, a background that sits quietly behind text — the color shades generator does it in one step. And before you ship any pairing of text and background, run it through the color contrast checker, which measures the contrast ratio so you can tell whether your combination is comfortably readable or only technically visible.
All four tools are free, need no account, and run entirely in your browser — your color values never get uploaded, and the live preview updates as you type rather than after a round trip to a server. That makes them fast enough to use as a scratchpad while you work: nudge a value, watch the swatch, copy the result. If you are building CSS rather than picking values, the CSS generators category has a gradient builder and a box-shadow builder that produce copy-ready code, and the generators category includes a random color generator if you just need a starting point.
Frequently asked questions
What contrast ratio should I be aiming for?
The widely used WCAG guidance asks for a ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal body text and 3 to 1 for large text, with a stricter 7 to 1 for the highest level. The contrast checker shows you the ratio so you can judge against whichever standard applies to your project.
Are HEX, RGB and HSL interchangeable?
For ordinary opaque colors, yes. HEX and RGB describe the same value in different notation, and HSL maps to the same sRGB colors. Rounding when converting to HSL and back can shift a value by a point or two, which is invisible in practice but can make two codes look slightly different.
Do these tools work with transparency?
Alpha is expressed through formats like RGBA, HSLA and eight-digit hex. Bear in mind that a contrast ratio for a semi-transparent color depends on whatever sits behind it, so check the final blended color rather than the transparent one.
Is my color data stored anywhere?
No. All four tools run in your browser, so nothing you enter is uploaded, saved or logged. They are free to use with no account.