Colour converter

The CMYK is approximate, and it has to be. Real CMYK depends on the press, the ink and the paper — a printer works from a colour profile, not from arithmetic. What's above is the standard naive conversion, which is what every other converter gives you and what a designer expects to see. It is a starting point for a conversation with your printer, not the value to send them.

HSL is the one to reach for when adjusting a colour. Hue, saturation, lightness map onto what you actually want to change — "the same colour but lighter" is one number in HSL and three unpredictable ones in RGB. It's why the palette generator works in HSL underneath.

Rounding is lossy in both directions. HSL and CMYK carry less information than RGB, so converting out and back doesn't always land on exactly the value you started with. Everything here is stored as RGB and derived from it once, so the number you type is the number that stays.