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

The idea of converting to HSV or some other color space seems good, and may be necessary for precise color work, but for ordinary purposes the error of working in RGB may not be enough to matter. Also, it can be a pain to deal with boundary cases: RGB is a cube-shaped space, while HSV is not. If working with byte values, you can have many-to-one and one-to-many mappings between the spaces. This may or may not be a problem depending on the application. YMMV