Tint, Shade, Hue, Tone: What Do They Mean?

Have you ever tried to describe a color to someone? There are infinite colors and words can only go so far, so the conversation can quickly get confusing. 

To make it even more challenging, we often toss around color terms without a common understanding of what they mean. 

If you understand basic color terminology, you can better communicate with your designer, painter or color consultant to achieve the look you desire (instead of the look they thought you desired). 

So, let’s get on the same page, shall we?

Let’s start with the most basic term, hue. Generally speaking, you can use the word hue with color interchangeably. Hue refers to the basic color families we’re most familiar with: pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, etc.. 

Tint, shade and tone are all ways of describing a color in relation to basic hue. For instance, if you like a particular color of green, but you’d like it to be darker, you could request a shade of that green.

If, on the other hand, you’d like that color to be lighter, ask for a tint. 

The most complicated of the color terms is tone. Tone affects the chroma, or saturation, of a hue. Imagine a bright lime green, too bold for your taste. If you want a more sophisticated, muted version of that hue, you’d say “tone it down.”

In practice, this means adding a dose of its opposite to tame the boldness (in this case, red, since green and red are complementary colors). This also has the lovely effect of adding depth, richness and sophistication to the color, which will be much more pleasing as paint on your walls.  

Next time a color doesn’t feel right to you, use your color vocabulary to modify it to better fit your preferences, environment and desired outcome.