It is common among some artistic painters to darken a paint color by adding black paint—producing colors called
shades—or to lighten a color by adding white—producing colors called
tints. However, this is not always the best way for representational painting, since one result is for colors to also shift in their hues. For instance, darkening a color by adding black can cause hue shifts towards
rose or
green (see
Bezold-Brücke shift). Lightening a color by adding white can cause even more noticeable hue shifts (see
Abney effect). Another practice when darkening a color is to use its opposite, or complementary, color (e.g. violet-purple added to yellowish-green) in order to neutralize it. When lightening a color this hue shift can be corrected with the addition of a small amount of an adjacent color to bring the hue of the mixture back in line with the parent color (e.g. adding a small amount of orange to a mixture of red and white will correct the shift of this mixture towards pink, that is, it will correct the Abney effect). ). Colors in the axis passing through black, grey, and white are in the achromatic axis (i.e. they have no
chroma). Maximum chroma colors of different hues are called
nuances. Colors of the same hue and saturation as a maximum chroma color, but of different lightness, are called
tints and
shades. Colors of the same hue and lightness, but of different saturation, are called
tones. ==See also==