HSL

Using HSL colors in WPF

Posted on March 01, 2009

One thing that has always irritated me about WPF is you’re still stuck specifying colors in RGB. HSL just feels so much more natural from a design standpoint. Well, we’re not completely out of luck—we’ve got markup extensions.

So I created my own HslColor and HslBrush extensions which are fairly simple to use:

<Window xmlns:e="clr-namespace:WpfExtensions"
        Background="{e:HslBrush H=300,S=50,L=75,A=80}"/>

Hue is specified in degrees from 0 to 360, while Saturation, Lightness, and Alpha are from 0 to 100. The parameters are all doubles and it converts to scRGB behind the scenes, which means you actually get a much higher color precision than if you had just used the equivalent RGB hex. With Windows 7 having native support for scRGB, this will future-proof your application to make good use of upcoming monitors with Deep Color support.