An important and convenient feature of the HVC Color Composer is the Contrast Measurement Utility. It looks like this, appearing just below the color space visualization:

To get a precise measurement of the contrast between any two colors, first click one of the swatches, then pick any color. Then click the other swatch, and pick another color. You can see the contrast between the two colors (the strength of the line separating both colors), and the contrast measurement appears next to them.

Note, if you ever want to retrieve a color from one of the swatches (pick that color again), simply double-click the swatch.

Contrast can be measured very precisely, more so than with any other tool, because of the accurate nature of HVC. To understand what it means to measure contrast, consider measuring color difference on a grayscale, like a ruler. It becomes a trivial matter, because you are only dealing with one axis. But using this tool, we can measure contrast just as accurately between any two colors, on any axis of HVC, no matter how they differ. Two colors can differ by all three qualities, hue, value, and chroma, yet we can know their precise relationship.

Measuring contrast accurately has great potential for improving your color selection. Understanding the visual relationships between your colors is the key to making better decisions. As you'll see soon, this is the basis for creating dynamic palettes with this program.

View the next topic: 4. Creating palettes

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