Get Slightly Lighter and Darker Color from UIColor

Question

I was looking to be able to turn any UIColor into a gradient. The way I am intending to do this is by using Core Graphics to draw a gradient. What I am trying to do is to ge

Answer 1

I render coloured cells based on a status value:

For this I wrote a swift extension based on some old objc code after I got an error using CryingHippo's suggestion:

extension UIColor{

    func darker(darker: CGFloat) -> UIColor{

        var red: CGFloat = 0.0
        var green: CGFloat = 0.0
        var blue: CGFloat = 0.0

        if self.colorSpace == UIColorSpace.genericGrayColorSpace(){

            red =  whiteComponent - darker
            green = whiteComponent - darker
            blue  = whiteComponent - darker
        } else {
            red = redComponent - darker
            green = greenComponent - darker
            blue = blueComponent - darker
        }

        if red < 0{
            green += red/2
            blue += red/2
        }

        if green < 0{
            red += green/2
            blue += green/2
        }

        if blue < 0{
            green += blue/2
            red += blue/2
        }

        return UIColor(
            calibratedRed: red,
            green: green,
            blue: blue,
            alpha: alphaComponent
        )
    }

    func lighter(lighter: CGFloat) -> UIColor{
        return darker(-lighter)
    }
}

The same works for NSColor as well. Simply replace UIColor with NSColor.