LAB or LCH color models in the color picker

Hi designers!

Our perceived lightness does not correspond well with the lightness attribute used in HSL and HSV, despite those being the most user-friendly and imaginable color pickers currently around.

LCH is a color model that improves this perception while keeping the usability and imagination as a picker, and it’s currently being rolled out to browsers as we speak, and it completely solves the perceived brightness - for CSS.

I think LCH (or LAB, which is similar) is a game-changer for digital artists and designers, and adding it as a color model to the Figma color picker would save a lot of time discovering colors and iterating on them.

Is anyone else interested in this? Do you know about LCH/LAB? What do you think of it? I have found a LCH plugin that helps the issue but it’s obviously not as useful as adding LCH to the actual picker in Figma.

Very interested in your thoughts.

Cheers!

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Huge plus from my side :slight_smile: I usually open Affinity when I need precise colour tuning.

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That’s exactly what I was thinking, so I decided to cook up one more plugin to be able to pick colors using LCH. It is basically Lea Verou’s color picker wrapped in a Figma plugin. I think it’ll do the job until the official support is in. Any feedback would be super appreciated!

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Browsers are starting to support this. Would be a great help for defining design system colors.

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And don’t forget oklab and oklch on that list!

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All browsers now support lab, oklab, lch and oklch - Safari, Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and all Chromium-based browsers yet so far very few design tools. A rather sad state of affairs I hope get resolved soon!

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With oklch now being pretty widely supported, it’d be great if Figma could support it.
We’re trying to keep everything design-related in our file but can’t communicate colors to developers properly.

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If you need a plugin for Oklch, you can use this one: here.

I found this plugin while reading a blog by EvilMartians on the topic: here.

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Thanks for the pointer. A plugin is fine for the design phase, but we rely on the Figma API to extract our design tokens from the file’s variables so we need native support.

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I would love official support for oklch, we’ve created our colour palette with it and having to jump between oklch.com and Figma is just more painful than this needs to be, especially as it’s not supported across all major browsers.

I realise there are plug ins, but I found them more painful to use given they’re not native to Figma.

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Most browsers now support this with the addition of dev mode LCH colors should be supported natively in Figma.

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