Muting a colour means reducing its saturation, moving it toward grey while broadly keeping its hue and lightness. This can be done directly (reducing saturation), or by mixing in a touch of its complementary colour, which neutralises some of the original hue's intensity — a classical paint-mixing technique. Optical mixing (small dots or fibres of two colours viewed from a distance, as in some textiles and pointillist painting) can also read as a softer blended colour without physically mixing pigment.
Practical advice
Adjust My Colour's 'less saturated' and 'more muted' options apply this directly and show a ranked set of results at different strengths.
| Step | Result | Lightness | Chroma | Hue | ΔE00 from start |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cobalt blue | #0047AB | 42.8 | 17.2 | 260° | 0.0 |
| Chroma at 75% | #204C95 | 42.8 | 13.0 | 260° | 3.5 |
| Chroma at 50% | #324F7E | 42.8 | 8.6 | 260° | 6.7 |
| Chroma at 25% | #415067 | 42.8 | 4.3 | 259° | 11.5 |
| Chroma removed | #4F4F4F | 42.8 | 0.0 | — | 26.1 |
| 25% complement mixed in as light | #414496 | 43.0 | 13.2 | 278° | 6.9 |
| 50% complement mixed in as light | #5B427D | 43.3 | 9.8 | 302° | 15.8 |
Scaling chroma to half leaves lightness at 42.8 and hue at 260°: the same blue, quieter. Mixing in half its complement also brings chroma down, to 9.8, but turns the hue 42° to a purple on the way — muted, and no longer quite the same colour.
How this was calculated. Chroma scaling holds OKLCH lightness and hue and multiplies chroma. The complement is the colour 180° round the OKLCH hue circle at the same lightness and chroma, mixed in as light. Mixing real complementary paints behaves differently again, for the reason given under paint mixing.