: Regular colors vs Muted colors What are muted colors? How do I create muted colours? How do I convert standard colors to muted colors? Why do muted colours look the way they do? Why are they

@Angela777

As stated in previous answers muted colors would depend on multiple factors.


you could minimize the amount of color or "pigment" in the color. In terms of paint mixing, you could add more black or more white to your color:
by lowering the saturation you add more black. By making the brightness higher, you add more white. These colors would be what you call "muted"
If you want a muted combonation of colors, you need to choose colors that are neighbors to each other on the color wheel.
There are three basic colors. all other colors are a mixture of these: Red, Blue,Yellow. If you mix red and blue you will recieve Purple, thus red and purple, or purple and blue are "relatives". so if you use a color pallete of blue hues and purple hues your pallete will be muted. or,alternatively you can use one color in different saturation or brightness levels, and your color pallete will be muted as well.

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@Shelley591

As Ryan stated, 'muted' isn't a technical term. In general, though, I'd argue that most people would consider a muted color a color that has low saturation.

I like the definition of the term on this page.


Saturation defines a range from pure color (100%) to gray (0%) at a constant lightness level. A pure color is fully saturated.


That page also mentions the term tone which is very similar...with tone being a term used more by painters and those working with subtractive color and saturation tends to be a term used by those working with additive color (digital artists, video, broadcast, etc.)

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@Alves566

There's no exact value that says, "this is muted" but "this is not muted."

If I were to come up with one on the spot as a general starting point I'd say use the HSB color spectrum and lower your colors S (saturation) to less than 50.



Or using your example image all I did was lower the Saturation which brought the S value of all of them down to around 52%:



But its not exact in that 52% could look muted depending on all sorts of factors. Some key ones are the viewing surface, the lighting, and the surrounding colors.

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