HSB to CMYK Converter
Convert HSB / HSV (hue, saturation, brightness) color values to CMYK print percentages.
cmyk(0%, 100%, 100%, 0%)
How HSB to CMYK conversion works
HSB (also called HSV) represents colors with three components: Hue (0°–360° on the color wheel), Saturation (0–100% from grey to vivid), and Brightness/Value (0–100% from black to full color). It is the model used by most design tools (Photoshop, Figma, Sketch). CMYK represents the same color as ink percentages — Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (black) — the subtractive model used for print. This tool first converts HSB to RGB, then derives CMYK by pulling out the black (K) channel and scaling the remaining channels accordingly, a standard device-independent approximation. Exact print output depends on your paper, ink, and ICC profile, so treat these values as a starting point. All conversion happens locally in your browser — nothing is uploaded. For related conversions, try HSB to RGB or RGB to CMYK.
Built and maintained by Meet Shah · Last updated
What this tool is used for
- Getting a print ink specification from a colour picked in a design tool.
- Producing a starting CMYK value for print collateral from an HSB palette.
- Understanding roughly how a screen-picked colour will appear in ink.
- Comparing a design palette against a print one in a single model.
- Converting a brand colour for a printer's requirement.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Why is brightness the wrong intuition for print?
- Because HSB brightness measures emitted light and ink emits none. Dropping brightness to 50% on screen dims the light; on paper the equivalent is adding black ink, which also shifts the hue slightly. The two operations look similar and are not the same transformation.
- What does full brightness mean once it is ink?
- The pure hue at 100% brightness — hsb(0, 100%, 100%) — becomes 0/100/100/0 in CMYK: full magenta plus full yellow, no black. That is the most saturated red four inks can make, and it is noticeably duller than the screen version because ink reflects rather than emits.
- Why does lowering saturation add ink rather than remove it?
- Because desaturating toward grey means all three colour channels converge, and the shared amount is extracted as K. So a pastel with low saturation can carry MORE total ink than a vivid one at the same brightness — which is the opposite of what the screen preview suggests.
- Which HSB values are safely printable?
- Roughly anything under about 90% saturation at moderate brightness. The trouble is concentrated at the corners: full saturation combined with full brightness is where sRGB extends furthest beyond the CMYK gamut, and it is exactly where design tools default when you drag to a corner of the picker.
- Should I design in HSB if the output is print?
- Pick in it, judge in CMYK. HSB's picker geometry makes choosing a colour fast, but nothing about the brightness axis predicts what the ink will do. Soft-proofing against the actual press profile is the step that catches a colour that cannot be reproduced.
Common errors and gotchas
- Expecting an exact match, since CMYK is device-dependent and any conversion is an approximation.
- Ignoring the colour profile, which determines the printed result more than the numbers do.
- Assuming a saturated screen colour is printable, when many lie outside the ink gamut.
- Confusing HSB with HSL as the source model, which changes the numbers before conversion even starts.
- Treating the conversion as reversible, since a round trip through CMYK loses information.