Constant Value Color Sets

Web colors are colored light.

I have explored making a dimmable and multi colored smart desk lamp, using a forty LED Neo-pixel shield for Arduino. The display draws 12 watts at full brightness, producing about as much light as a 60 watt incandescent lamp. Making this work requires an understanding of constant value color sets because the lamp should remain the same brightness as the color changes.

Constant value color sets are sets of colors in which the sum of the component values for each color are equal to a constant value. They are slanted planer slices through the Cartesian color space. The pallets produced are visually pleasing.

The set of web colors contain 2²⁴ or 16,777,216 colors. To keep things simple here, we'll look at a simplified set of 2⁹ or 512 colors.

The ninth slice through the nine bit color space modeled with domino dots.

There are 22 slices through the 2⁹ color set, one for each of the 21 possible values, 3(2³ - 1), plus one more for 0. Only the slices with a value divisible by three have a gray (or black or white) tile. The full set of web colors would have (I am guessing here) 3(2⁸ - 1), plus one more or 766 slices.

Let's turn down the lights and have a look.