<P> In color theory, a tint is the mixture of increases shade or variety of color, which reduces lightness . A tone is produced either by the mixture of a color with grey, or by both tinting and shading . Mixing a color with any neutral color (including black, gray and white) reduces the chroma, or colorfulness, while the hue remains unchanged . </P> <P> In common language, the term "shade" can be generalized to furthermore encompass any varieties of a particular color, whether technically they are shades, tints, tones, or slightly different hues; while the term "tint" can be generalized to refer to any lighter or darker variation of a color (e.g. Tinted windows). </P> <P> 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 . When we mix colorants, such as the pigments in paint mixtures, a color is produced which is always darker and lower in chroma, or saturation, than the parent colors . This moves the mixed color toward a neutral color--a gray or near - black . Lights are made brighter or dimmer by adjusting their brightness, or energy level; in painting, lightness is adjusted through mixture with white, black or a color's complement . </P> <P> It is common among some artistic painters to darken a paint color by adding black paint--producing colors called shades--or to lighten a color by adding white--producing colors called tints . However, this is not always the best way for representational painting, since an unfortunate result is for colors to also shift in their hues . For instance, darkening a color by adding black can cause colors such as yellows, reds and oranges, to shift toward the greenish or bluish part of the spectrum . Lightening a color by adding white can cause a shift towards blue when mixed with reds and oranges . Another practice when darkening a color is to use its opposite, or complementary, color (e.g. violet - purple added to yellowish - green) in order to neutralize it without a shift in hue, and darken it if the additive color is darker than the parent color . When lightening a color this hue shift can be corrected with the addition of a small amount of an adjacent color to bring the hue of the mixture back in line with the parent color (e.g. adding a small amount of orange to a mixture of red and white will correct the tendency of this mixture to shift slightly towards the blue end of the spectrum). </P>

What is a soft shade of colour called