: Is there a standard for color wheels? I am aware of two common types of color wheels - RYB and RGB, but it seems that even two wheels of the same type can look different in different software.

@Michele215

Really interesting question.

Yes. There are standarized "RGB" color wheels.

An RGB... which is in reality a RYGCBM color wheel is pretty much a mechanical representation.

There are some variations, such as a HSB, HSL, or HSV wheel but the "main" component to of the round part (wheel) is the Hue, with some "normalized" angles. Look at this google image search www.google.com/search?q=hsl+color+wheel
They are different transformations and projections of an RGB cube (Which renders an hexagon)

They are "standarized" in the aplications that want to adopt them (but no one is forcing to do so). For example they are adopted in Corel aplications, Gimp, Inkscape, a ton of painting programs that I know, MediBang, MyPaint, Dogwaffle, 3D programs, Blender, Sketchup, video editing programs... Any program that I checked that I have installed on my computers has one form or another of this Color wheel... except Photoshop! (I currently do not have some other adobe programs installed)

No

Because there is a ton of variations on the color solids.

A color model is not a 2D shape, it is a 3D volume because we can separate it into 3 Dimensions. And there are quite a number of 3D volumes trying to describe color.

You can choose different planes to intersect to form a 2D representation.



Perceptual models

As I said. The standard color wheel is a mechanical representation, a cut from a 3D mechanical volume. But there are other volumes, for example the Munsell model.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/Munsell_1929_color_solid_cylindrical_coordinates.png
You can see that the model is not a regular shape, because humans are more suceptible to recognize variations in some hues than others.

In this other example in the zone C, we detect less variations than the zone D.



Artistic liberty

The adobe wheel is not an RYB one.

I assume that those color wheels have artistic freedom and interpretation of harmonies because they are intended to provide a perceptual-based tool, so that is (in my opinion) each one has adopted a specific model-variation-interpretation.



And I am not sure

Of other color models, for example, the Lab* model has some variations, implemented in some extent in Photographic applications, like white balance in cameras. But to tell the truth I have not a good amount of information about it.



Are thoose circles RYB?

Based on @Kadilov request, i add this part about the color wheel used in the linked sites on the question.

paletton.com seems to have in fact an RYB color wheel. You can see how the colors correspond to the vertices in an hexagon.



But on the case of the adobe... I have no idea. It is not RYB, neither an RGB+CMY or Lab.

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@Vandalay110

Color is a really complicated subject, much more complicated than people think. There is no simple algorithm that can deal with color in many cases. Often you need a lot of tabulated data to do so.

The main problem is that a color wheel does not really make scientifically sense as such. So a color wheel looks different based on what the wheel author is trying solve whit it, because there is no fundamental arbitration on what is correct. So the wheel can optimize for at least following:


Ease of implementation, which is the most common.
Having equal distance between hues
Having correct complementary color on the opposig side
...


One can not really say which one is more right. It depends on who you ask.

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