pastel

A command-line tool to generate, analyze, convert and manipulate colors.

Tutorial

General remarks

pastel provides a number of commands like saturate, mix or paint. To see a complete list, you can simply run

pastel

To get more information about a specific subcommand (say mix), you can call pastel mix -h or pastel help mix.

Many pastel commands can be composed by piping the output of one command to another, for example:

pastel random | pastel mix red | pastel lighten 0.2 | pastel format hex

Showing colors

Converting colors

Manipulating colors

Generating colors

Installation

Development

Resources

Interesting Wikipedia pages:

• Color difference
• CIE 1931 color space
• CIELAB color space
• Line of purples
• Impossible color
• sRGB
• Color theory
• Eigengrau

Color names:

• XKCD Color Survey Results
• Peachpuffs and Lemonchiffons - talk about named colors
• List of CSS color keywords

Maximally distinct colors:

• How to automatically generate N "distinct" colors?
• Publication on two algorithms to generate (maximally) distinct colors

Other articles and videos:

• Color Matching
• Introduction to color spaces