Tint, shade and tone

In color theory, a tint is a mixture of a color with white, which increases lightness, while a shade is a mixture with black, which increases darkness. A tone is produced either by mixing a color with gray, or by both tinting and shading. Mixing a color with any neutral color (black, gray, and white) reduces the chroma, or colorfulness, while the perceived hue can be affected slightly (see Abney effect and Bezold-Brücke shift).

In the graphic arts, especially printmaking and drawing, "tone" has a different meaning, referring to areas of continuous color, produced by various means, as opposed to the linear marks made by an engraved or drawn line.

In common language, the term shade can be generalized to encompass any varieties of a particular color, whether technically they are shades, tints, tones, or slightly different hues. Meanwhile, the term tint can be generalized to refer to any lighter or darker variation of a color (e.g. "tinted windows").

When mixing colored light (additive color models), the achromatic mixture of spectrally balanced red, green, and blue (RGB) is always white, not gray or black. In colorants, such as the pigments in paint mixtures, a balanced mixture of complementaries, or a balanced mixture of three or more colors, will result in a color that is darker and lower in chroma and saturation, than the parent colors. This moves the mixed color toward a neutral color—a gray or near-black.