What is color vibrancy?
Color vibrancy is the perceived intensity, liveliness, and visual energy of a color. In color theory, vibrant colors appear rich, vivid, and attention-grabbing, while dull colors feel muted or washed out. Vibrancy is strongly influenced by chroma, which represents the purity or saturation of a color, but it is also affected by lightness. Colors with very low or very high lightness often appear less vibrant, even when highly saturated, because the human eye perceives the strongest visual richness around mid-lightness ranges. As a result, vibrancy is not simply “how saturated” a color is, but how balanced its saturation and brightness feel together.
How we calculate vibrancy?
Our vibrancy calculation uses the LCh color space, which models color using perceptual lightness (L) and chroma (C). First, chroma is normalized to a 0–1 range to measure the relative color intensity. Then, a mid-lightness peak factor is calculated, which gives the highest vibrancy values to colors near the middle of the lightness range and gradually reduces vibrancy toward pure black or pure white. The final vibrancy score is computed by multiplying the normalized chroma by the mid-lightness factor and scaling the result to a range between 0 and 100. This approach reflects human perception more accurately, since highly saturated colors tend to feel most vibrant when they are neither too dark nor too bright.