Guide

Chroma: where the intensity actually lives

Most references are far more neutral than they feel, and the most saturated point on a form is usually not where you would put it.

Chroma is how saturated a colour is, which is to say how far it sits from grey. It is the third axis after value and hue, and it is the one painters judge worst, because the eye reads a muted red and a vivid red as simply "red" and stops there.

Your reference is far more neutral than it feels

Look at where the intensity actually lives in a photograph and the answer is almost always: a small fraction of the surface. Most of a picture sits in muted, low-chroma colour, and the vivid passages are a handful of places. Painters routinely raise the chroma of everything, ending up with a painting where every part shouts and nothing carries.

The practical consequence is that most of what you mix should be grey-ish. Not muddy, which is a different failure, but genuinely low in saturation, mixed deliberately rather than by accident.

Chroma accents

If everything in your painting looks equally intense, you have lost your accents. The fix is almost never to push the focal point further. It is to knock the surroundings back, because chroma only reads as intense in relation to something quieter.

Decide before you start where your two or three most saturated notes will be, and protect them. Those are the places worth spending your cadmium or your phthalo on. Everywhere else can be mixed from earths and neutrals, and will look better for it.

Chroma across a form, and where it peaks

Here is the part that changes how people paint. On a rounded form lit from one side, chroma does not simply rise with the light. On most turning forms the most saturated point sits in the halftone, just before the shadow, not in the brightest area.

The reason is that the brightest light is partly specular reflection, which carries the colour of the light source rather than the object, and washes the local colour out. As the form turns away, the specular component falls off before the light does, so the object's own colour shows most strongly in the band just before it turns into shadow.

• Chroma peaks in the halftone: you are looking at a turning form. Save your strongest colour for the turn.
• Chroma rides with the light: keep saturation in the lights and let the shadows go quiet. Common on matte surfaces and on flat planes facing the light.
• Chroma peaks near the shadow: your lights want to be greyer than you think. Resist over-saturating them.
• Chroma stays flat and low: let value do the work. Chroma will not carry the form here.

Lowering chroma without going muddy

There are three ways to reduce saturation, and they do not look the same:

1. Add the complement. Neutralises while keeping the mixture alive. A touch of ultramarine into burnt sienna, or terre verte into a red. This is the one that keeps the colour looking like paint.
2. Add grey. Mix a grey of the right value from black and white and add it. Safe, predictable, and slightly inert if you use it everywhere.
3. Add an earth. Yellow ochre or raw umber pulls chroma down while shifting hue. Useful when you want the colour to move as well as quieten.

Written by Soren Ulsig. Last updated 2026-08-29.