Secondary Color Picker
Pick a secondary color, orange, green, purple, cyan, magenta or yellow, and copy any shade as HEX, RGB or HSL.
Click any shade to select it, or use Copy HEX for the selected color.
How to use the Secondary Color Picker
- Choose a secondary color from the ramps: orange, green, purple, plus cyan, magenta and yellow.
- Click a shade to select it and preview the exact color.
- Copy the HEX, with RGB and HSL shown alongside, for your design or stylesheet.
- Want the bases first? Start at the primary colors and mix from there.
Orange, green and purple color picker
In the paint-based RYB model, mixing two primaries in equal amounts gives the three classic secondaries. Each is shown as a full ramp so you can pull a soft tint or a deep shade:
Cyan, magenta and yellow: the screen secondaries
Screens do not mix paint, they mix light, so their secondaries are different. Combining two RGB primaries gives cyan, magenta and yellow, the same trio that anchors CMYK printing. That is why this picker includes all six main secondaries, not just the artist set.
How each secondary is mixed
- Red and yellow make orange.
- Yellow and blue make green.
- Blue and red make purple.
- On screen, green and blue light make cyan, red and blue make magenta, red and green make yellow.
Why the secondary colors depend on the model
The honest answer to "what are the secondary colors" is that it depends on whether you are mixing paint or light. Treating orange, green and purple as the only secondaries is a paint-era habit; on a screen, cyan, magenta and yellow are just as fundamental. Knowing both sets is what keeps a design consistent from the canvas to the monitor.
Where secondary colors get used
- Accent colors that sit comfortably against a primary base in branding.
- Color-wheel theory and teaching, as the bridge between primaries and tertiary colors.
- Print workflows, where cyan, magenta and yellow are the working inks.
- Building richer palettes by softening a secondary into tints and shades.
In the RYB paint model, yes: orange, green and purple. On screens the secondaries are cyan, magenta and yellow, so this picker shows all six.
Orange is #FFA500, green is #008000 and purple is #800080. Cyan, magenta and yellow are #00FFFF, #FF00FF and #FFFF00.
Tertiary colors, made by mixing a primary with an adjacent secondary, like red-orange.
They are what you get by mixing two primaries of light, which is also why they are the core printing inks in CMYK.