Alter saturation or brightness of a color

Question

I'm using xcolor.sty's nifty wheel function to define a color scheme based on a single base color. So, for example:

\definecolor{base}{HTML}{AADD96}
\colorlet{complement}{base>wheel,1,3}

makes base a pale green color, and complement a similarly pale blue (1/4 of the way round the color wheel).

Is there a way to similarly define colors by changing the saturation or brightness of an existing color?

Answer 1

You could use \definecolorseries:

\definecolor{base}{HTML}{AADD96}
\definecolorseries{moresaturated}{hsb}{step}{base}{0,0.2,0}
\resetcolorseries{moresaturated}

will let you use moresaturated!![1] for a somewhat more saturated colour, moresaturated!![2] for an even more saturated one, and so on. (But beware overflow: once the saturation reaches 1, it's reset to zero. Here moresaturated!![4] is less saturated than base.)

Obviously you can use the same trick to go down in saturation, or up or down in brightness.