Try Tuts+ Premium, Get Cash Back!
Quick Tip: What The Heck Is A Hex Value Anyway?
videos

Quick Tip: What The Heck Is A Hex Value Anyway?

on Mar 23rd 2011 with 49 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Requirements: None... :)
  • Difficulty: Beginner
  • Run Time: 4:15 min

In today’s video quick tip, Adam, editor of the awesome Aetuts+, explains the history and logic behind a color’s hex value. Enjoy!


Press the HD button for a clearer picture.

Download Tutorial .flv

Adam Everett Miller is everettoptions on Videohive
 
Enjoyed this Post?

Subscribe to our RSS Feed, Follow us on Twitter or simply recommend us to friends and colleagues!

By

Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

I am the editor of Aetuts+. Originally from Minnesota, I moved to Virginia in 2004 where I met my insanely hot wife and now work on cool projects with some good friends.  

Plus Premium
 
 
Note: Want to add some source code? Type <pre><code> before it and </code></pre> after it. Find out more
  • Andrew

    This is exactly where my computer science education comes in. :)

  • EmpreJorge

    Jeffrey Way should do videos like this one xD
    This one was really informative, funny to watch and easy to understand .D
    thanks.

    • http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way

      Yeah – like I can compete with a guy who works with video for a living. :)

      • Ben Stanley

        Do it, you won’t :)

  • http://gerard.mathiuet.ch scherii

    That was one hex of a tutorial! More videos of this kind would be highly appreciated :)

  • ………

    Computers work on TWOs not on eights… 0 and 1, twos…

    • Potado

      Eight is a power of two…

      • //adrusi.com/ adrusi

        yes, but if you say that computers like to think in 8′s, then the explanation for 16 is wrong. computers don’t care that 16 is 8 * 2, the “like” it because it’s 2 * 2 * 2 * 2.

    • http://zecel.com Zecel Studios

      1 byte = 8 bit

      • http://fellgrail.com Fellgrail

        No, a byte is a ‘convenient collection of bits’ whatever size happens to be best for the system (technically).

        And its not that ‘computers like to think in 2s’

        It’s that they literally only have two states.

        it goes all the way down to the electrical level. A particular circuit is either ON (1) or OFF (0).
        Thus if you want to program a computer, you decide what parts of the computer at a given time are ON or OFF (1 or 0). So you only have two numbers to work with.

        It’s tedious to program in binary though, so we abstact it away if we can. As long as our units are powers of two, we can represent it in binary so there is no problem. Which is why Octal and Hex are great. It’s easier to program with hex in mind, instead of binary.

        So yes, the video is wrong.

    • brandon

      yeah they work on 2′s…

      Now they went to a 4 bit system, and then ASCII needed 7 bits so we filled that in by using a 2 4-bit system or 8bits, 1 byte and now we go off of 8′s. But it’s really 2′s.

  • http://www.marioplanet.com Zach

    Awesome video!

    Very informative, but also amusing.

  • http://www.jpswebdesign.net Saul

    Very good tut!! Excelent! It was very funny but very informative too!

    Thanks

  • waste

    Adam is great on camera, very entertaining and natural =) Moar!

  • http://martinansty.co.uk Martin Ansty

    This why you’ve been researching green screens all day Jeffrey?

    • http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way

      Nope — that comes next week.

  • Alaa

    pretty good and fun to watch vid .
    i’ve totally enjoyed it.

  • SalmanAbbas007

    Now this guy has some teaching skills :D XD

  • http://mydsign.wordpress.com mod

    thank you, very funny and greate information

  • http://facester.me Jhenee

    what the hex! this guy is very natural, excellent! keep on coming!

  • http://www.arnoldt.de arnoldt

    although i know everything about hexvalues and all the math stuff he s talking about- i couldn’t stop watching the movie – so funny! very good entertainment – thx a lot!

  • Claudiu

    There are 256 values for colors: from 0 to 255.

    So the question is not legit. :D

    • Ben Stanley

      You explained it in 1 sentence better than he did in like 5 :P
      Awesome video though!

  • http://mja.lv/ Matīss Jānis

    Amazing! I didn’t know this. Thanks :)

  • http://marketplace.tutsplus.com/user/NikolaMalich Nikola Malich

    Great video, informative and entertaining! :)

  • khaled

    hahah sooo funny ;)

  • JFB

    Simple, well explained, entertaining and very informative.

    Great video !

  • http://webdesignertutorials.com web designer tutorials

    Yeah, that’s just 0s and 1s, not 8s.

  • http://in-view.net Frank T

    Hey Adam – great video… but, you did kind of skip the binary part and that the color is really just three sexteen, I MEAN SIXTEEN, BIT values used to represent the RGB – and that decimal values 0 to 255 could be used just as well as long as you use the correct syntax.

    So… Adam, where did the RGB idea come from?

  • BigBlind

    I knew this already, but the vid was fun to watch. There’s one thing that helps me when working with numeric systems. If you give every digit (or symbol) in the number) an index from 0 to n (number of digits), than to get the total number, you add up eacch digit multiplied by the base number of the numeric system to the power of the index. This probably sounds confusing, so I’ll try to illustrate that with an example. Let’s take the number 364, in our decimal system.

    364.

    Now, when we write the indices of each digit above them, we get

    2 1 0
    3 6 4

    if we would not know the system, we would be able to find the number by doing this

    4*10^0 + 6*10^1*3*10^2

    so, we multiply every digit with the base number (in this case 10) to the power of it’s index. remember that anything to the power of 0 equals 1.

    the same number in binary would look like this:

    1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0

    proof:
    0 * 2^0 = 0
    + 1*2^2 = 2
    + 1*2^3 = 10
    + 0*2^4 = 10
    + 1*2^5 = 42
    + 1*2^6 = 108
    + 0*2^7 = 108
    + 1*2^8 = 364

    • http://www.dazydude.net Rik de Vos

      4*10^0 + 6*10^1 + 3*10^2
      instead of
      4*10^0 + 6*10^1*3*10^2

      :)

      • w1sh

        CRIPPLE FIGHT!!!!!

  • Al

    hex values came out the fact that a byte consists of 8 bits, all based the 2 number system, maximum value 1111 1111 which just happens to be 255. computers don’t know any other number system other than the 0 and 1 so we had to develop something to address bigger numbers that we are used to dealing with.

    worked with hex values in Assembler and COBOL years ago and the ASCII codes for many years. so it was interesting to me that colours were defined by using the hex values for different variations on Red, Green and Blue. not difficult for me to adapt the hex color values, other than trying to figure out what combinations of R, G, and B give you the colour you want.

    Al .

  • http://adevtus.com Valentin

    255 is the max value for colors because the numbering starts from 0 so there are 256 possible values in total for one color.

  • http://webpresence.bg/en/ WebPresence

    It would be fun and pretty interesting to see some dev or coding videos (for nettuts) like this. :-D
    I enjoyed this one and I’d expect some more. :)

    Cheers.

  • Edward Longman

    WOW that was some serious eye candy
    Don’t worry Jeffery I totally understand why you don’t do this, because he has aftereffect skillz.
    Still he always sounded genuinely really excited which perhaps you could improve on.

    • Shaun C

      I feel Jeffrey is very enthusiastic in his videos (especially for someone that is particularly skilled in a field like ours). I could watch/listen to either – both are great teachers!

  • Adam

    iPad version please

  • http://in-view.net Frank T

    You have all missed the point of where even binary came from. I know it’s basic but without DIGITAL [1's & 0's] computers we would still be doing multiple floating point math using ANALOG [-infinity to +infinity] computers and averaging the results. I KNOW, I was there with the last of the first fire control [meaning gun aiming] guesstimating computers. a single HEX character is just a convenient method of us humans representing 8 binary digits [BITS] of data but very inconvenient for us humans to sum or mask without breaking back down to binary or decimal.

    Would still like to know why we stopped the RBG representation at TWO HEX digits, why not THREE or FOUR? And what was the reason for RBG in the first place? :)

  • http://in-view.net Frank T

    Al: check out the great article on CGA/VGA/Web Colors on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Web-safe_colors

  • hector

    i can’t believe there are people who would visit this site and not understand the concept of hexadecimal values. still, it’s a good video to show people who aren’t in the know.

  • http://zecel.com Zecel Studios

    I just love the way this video was made, awesome #FFF+

  • http://zyglobe.com Evan

    I shall refer to it as sexidecimal from now on (and pronounce it, ‘sexy-decimal’)

  • http://netoxico.com netoxico

    Very good way to teach the hex values. Cool

  • leperro

    This is a nice video! It would be great to see more on the subject! Thanks

  • Daniel Balfour

    Great video Adam!

  • http://vishu.net Vishu

    That was great!! One hex of a video!!

  • http://www.iwebprovider.com Innovative Web Provider

    Cool teaching lesson! Very informative. Thank you so much

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000494066331 Matthew

    Angane eeennm famous aakki! Tankoo chetta!! :-) Link okke paranju kodutho? Alla… vere onnum kondalla… theanju otti irikkuvaneey… Korachu cash udane kittiyilleel pani kittum, atha! :D