How do I determine darker or lighter color variant of a given color?

Posted by Nidonocu on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Nidonocu
Published on 2008-09-18T22:27:34Z Indexed on 2010/04/22 10:43 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 156

Filed under:

c#

|

colors

Given a source color of any hue by the system or user, I'd like a simple algorithm I can use to work out a lighter or darker variants of the selected color. Similar to effects used on Windows Live Messenger for styling the user interface.

Language is C# with .net 3.5.

Responding to comment: Color format is (Alpha)RGB. With values as bytes or floats.

Marking answer: For the context of my use (a few simple UI effects), the answer I'm marking as accepted is actually the most simple for this context. However, I've given up votes to the more complex and accurate answers too. Anyone doing more advanced color operations and finding this thread in future should definitely check those out. Thanks SO. :)

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about c#

.NET WebRequest.PreAuthenticate not quite what it sounds like

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve run into the problem a few times now: How to pre-authenticate .NET WebRequest calls doing an HTTP call to the server – essentially send authentication credentials on the very first request instead of waiting for a server challenge first? At first glance this sound like it should be easy:… >>> More
HttpWebRequest and Ignoring SSL Certificate Errors

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Man I can't believe this. I'm still mucking around with OFX servers and it drives me absolutely crazy how some these servers are just so unbelievably misconfigured. I've recently hit three different 3 major brokerages which fail HTTP validation with bad or corrupt certificates at least according to… >>> More
Dynamic Type to do away with Reflection

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
The dynamic type in C# 4.0 is a welcome addition to the language. One thing I’ve been doing a lot with it is to remove explicit Reflection code that’s often necessary when you ‘dynamically’ need to walk and object hierarchy. In the past I’ve had a number of ReflectionUtils that used string based expressions… >>> More
The dynamic Type in C# Simplifies COM Member Access from Visual FoxPro

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve written quite a bit about Visual FoxPro interoperating with .NET in the past both for ASP.NET interacting with Visual FoxPro COM objects as well as Visual FoxPro calling into .NET code via COM Interop. COM Interop with Visual FoxPro has a number of problems but one of them at least got a lot… >>> More
Finding a Relative Path in .NET

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Here’s a nice and simple path utility that I’ve needed in a number of applications: I need to find a relative path based on a base path. So if I’m working in a folder called c:\temp\templates\ and I want to find a relative path for c:\temp\templates\subdir\test.txt I want to receive back subdir\test… >>> More

Related posts about colors

urxvt bold colors are wrong - bold #0-7 are using colors from #8-15

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
My colors are off. Specifically, the bold version of colors 1-6 is broken: The color of each (emboldened) index should match the color of the text beside it. It does not. This is generated from this gist, modified to enumerate colors 0-15 instead of 16-256. Update: Here's what's going on: Bold… >>> More
make emacs in a terminal use dark colors and not light font-lock colors

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I am using emacs on MacOS 10.6 with Terminal. I have a white background. It's very hard to read quoted C++ strings. They are coming up in pale green. Keywords are in turquoise. After searching through the source I cam across cpp.el and have determined that I am using the cpp-face-light-name-list… >>> More
How can I make gnome-terminal not transparent?

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
When I use gnome-terminal the background is annoyingly slightly-transparent. Here you can read the ubuntu.stackexchange.com site through the background. Bigger image These are the background options I have, which are set to "not transparent". I have the desktop visual effects set to "Normal"… >>> More
Text editor with coloring to highlight "non-parameters" in conf files?

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
Some .conf files have a lot of comments and parameters in them like so: # WINS Server - Tells the NMBD components of Samba to be a WINS Client # Note: Samba can be either a WINS Server, or a WINS Client, but NOT both ; wins server = w.x.y.z # This will prevent nmbd to search for NetBIOS names through… >>> More
Black & White Video with Youtube

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
Hey'a guys, I have an issue with the Youtube Player within Ubuntu, it seems that when playing videos there in black & white, no matter if there normal or HD. I kind of figured out how to prevent this from happening by deleting the cookie PREF that holds a KV Pair like so: PREF f1=50000000&fv=10… >>> More