Question

I’m trying to interpolate between two colours in HSV colour space to produce a smooth colour gradient.

I’m using a linear interpolation, eg:

h = (1 - p) * h1 + p * h2
s = (1 - p) * s1 + p * s2
v = (1 - p) * v1 + p * v2

(where p is the percentage, and h1, h2, s1, s2, v1, v2 are the hue, saturation and value components of the two colours)

This produces a good result for s and v but not for h. As the hue component is an angle, the calculation needs to work out the shortest distance between h1 and h2 and then do the interpolation in the right direction (either clockwise or anti-clockwise).

What formula or algorithm should I use?

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EDIT: By following Jack’s suggestions I modified my JavaScript gradient function and it works well. For anyone interested, here’s what I ended up with:

// create gradient from yellow to red to black with 100 steps
var gradient = hsbGradient(100, [{h:0.14, s:0.5, b:1}, {h:0, s:1, b:1}, {h:0, s:1, b:0}]); 

function hsbGradient(steps, colours) {
  var parts = colours.length - 1;
  var gradient = new Array(steps);
  var gradientIndex = 0;
  var partSteps = Math.floor(steps / parts);
  var remainder = steps - (partSteps * parts);
  for (var col = 0; col < parts; col++) {
    // get colours
    var c1 = colours[col], 
        c2 = colours[col + 1];
    // determine clockwise and counter-clockwise distance between hues
    var distCCW = (c1.h >= c2.h) ? c1.h - c2.h : 1 + c1.h - c2.h;
        distCW = (c1.h >= c2.h) ? 1 + c2.h - c1.h : c2.h - c1.h;
     // ensure we get the right number of steps by adding remainder to final part
    if (col == parts - 1) partSteps += remainder; 
    // make gradient for this part
    for (var step = 0; step < partSteps; step ++) {
      var p = step / partSteps;
      // interpolate h, s, b
      var h = (distCW <= distCCW) ? c1.h + (distCW * p) : c1.h - (distCCW * p);
      if (h < 0) h = 1 + h;
      if (h > 1) h = h - 1;
      var s = (1 - p) * c1.s + p * c2.s;
      var b = (1 - p) * c1.b + p * c2.b;
      // add to gradient array
      gradient[gradientIndex] = {h:h, s:s, b:b};
      gradientIndex ++;
    }
  }
  return gradient;
}

Answer 1

You should just need to find out which is the shortest path from starting hue to ending hue. This can be done easily since hue values range from 0 to 255.

You can first subtract the lower hue from the higher one, then add 256 to the lower one to check again the difference with swapped operands.

int maxCCW = higherHue - lowerHue;
int maxCW = (lowerHue+256) - higherHue;

So you’ll obtain two values, the greater one decides if you should go clockwise or counterclockwise. Then you’ll have to find a way to make the interpolation operate on modulo 256 of the hue, so if you are interpolating from 246 to 20 if the coefficient is >= 0.5f you should reset hue to 0 (since it reaches 256 and hue = hue%256 in any case).

Actually if you don’t care about hue while interpolating over the 0 but just apply modulo operator after calculating the new hue it should work anyway.