HSL to Pantone

HSL stands for Hue, Saturation, and Lightness. It's a color model that describes colors in a way that's often more intuitive for humans than RGB or HEX. Hue represents the color itself (0-360° on a color wheel), Saturation is the intensity or purity of the color (0-100%), and Lightness is how light or dark the color is (0-100%). This model makes it easier to create color variations and harmonious palettes.

HSL is ideal for digital design and UI development due to its intuitive controls, but when moving to physical production (printing, textiles, etc.), Pantone's standardized color system ensures consistent results. Converting HSL to Pantone helps maintain color integrity between digital design and physical output, preventing costly mismatches in production.

The tool first converts HSL values to RGB, then to the LAB color space, which is designed to approximate human color perception. It calculates the color distance between your input color and each Pantone color in the selected library using the CIEDE2000 formula, which accounts for how humans perceive color differences. The closest matches are presented with confidence scores based on these calculations.

HSL can represent colors that fall outside the reproducible range (gamut) of specific Pantone libraries. Highly saturated colors or extreme lightness values may not have direct Pantone equivalents, resulting in poorer matches. In these cases, consider adjusting your HSL values slightly to find a better match, or consult with your production team to identify acceptable alternatives.