Because of the way our eyes work, a particular color can be defined using three components.
We usually program colors in a computer by specifying their RGB values, which
set the intensity of the red, green, and blue channels in a display.
But for analyzing the perceptual attributes of a color, it’s better to think
in terms of hue, saturation, and luminance channels.
Hue is the component that distinguishes “different colors” in a non-technical
sense. It’s property of color that leads to first-order names like “red” and “blue”:
Saturation (or chroma) is the colorfulness. Two colors with different hues
will look more distinct when they have more saturation:
And lightness corresponds to how much light is emitted (or reflected,
for printed colors), ranging from black to white: