Into the Blue
#4f7ba7
A blue that is muted. It is mid — the hardest range to put text on, either colour struggles.
Hex
#4f7ba7
RGB
79, 123, 167
OKLCh
57.0% 0.084 249.5°
CIELAB (D50)
49.8, -5.8, -28.6
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 10 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it — this part of the space is crowded, and the names here are finer distinctions than most people make.
- It uses 53% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
- As text on white it measures APCA Lc 70.7; on black, Lc -30.9. The sign is the polarity, which the WCAG ratio discards.
- Built into an eleven-step scale, 10 of the 10 adjacent pairs stay ΔE00 2 apart — see the ramp.
- protanopia and deuteranopia and tritanopia shift it by ΔE00 13.1 and 12.3 and 10.2 — no red cone.
Text on this colour
White text
4.45:1 — large text only
Black text
4.72:1 — passes AA
Black text is the better of the two at4.72:1. That is enough for body text.
As text on white, it needs to change
#4e7aa6 is the nearest colour of the same hue that passes AA on white, at 4.50:1. Only the lightness moved.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#4f7ba7
protanopia
#7777a7 · ΔE00 13.1
deuteranopia
#7070a8 · ΔE00 12.3
tritanopia
#6868e0 · ΔE00 10.2
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isParisian Blue at ΔE00 1.102: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.
- Parisian BlueΔE00 1.102 · #4f7ca4
- Aleutian IsleΔE00 1.386 · #4d7eaa
- Co PilotΔE00 1.484 · #4978a9
- Billycart BlueΔE00 1.534 · #4c77a4
- Sage Blossom BlueΔE00 1.554 · #4e78a9
- PacificaΔE00 1.568 · #4e77a3
- SleepΔE00 1.786 · #4579ac
- Neapolitan BlueΔE00 1.838 · #4d7faa
- Azul Pavo RealΔE00 1.857 · #537faf
- BorageΔE00 1.972 · #507ea4
- Biedermeier BlueΔE00 2.067 · #507ca0
- Field BlueΔE00 2.184 · #4477aa
12 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.