How do I determine darker or lighter color variant of a given color?

Question

Given a source color of any hue by the system or user, I\'d like a simple algorithm I can use to work out a lighter or darker variants of the selected color. Similar to effe

Answer 1

If you are using RGB colors I would transform this color paramaters to HSL (hue, saturation, lightness), modify the lightness parameter and then transform back to RGB. Google around and you'll find a lot of code samples on how to do these color representation transformations (RGB to HSL and viceversa).

This is what I quickly found: http://bytes.com/forum/thread250450.html