Cscolor

Cscolor is a lightweight, open‑source library designed for manipulating and converting color values across multiple color models. The project was first released in 2015 by developer Alex Navarro and has since seen regular updates, with its latest major version 3.2 released in March 2024. Cscolor targets developers working in C, C++, and embedded systems, providing a small, dependency‑free API that can be compiled with standard GCC, Clang, or MSVC toolchains.

Key features include conversion between RGB, HEX, HSL, HSV, and CMYK color spaces, as well as lookup utilities for common color names. The library offers functionality for adjusting brightness, saturation, and contrast programmatically, and supports linear and perceptual color profiles. Its API is intentionally simple, exposing functions such as cscolor_rgb_to_hex, cscolor_hex_to_rgb, cscolor_adjust_brightness, and cscolor_hsl_to_rgb. The codebase is written in C99 and contains comprehensive unit tests that run on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Cscolor is distributed under the MIT License, allowing free use in both commercial and non‑commercial projects. The project maintains a GitHub repository hosting source code, documentation, and issue tracking. Contributors can submit pull requests, report bugs, or discuss potential enhancements via Pull Requests and Issues. A mailing list and Discord channel provide community support for developers needing guidance on integrating the library into larger projects or extending its capabilities.

In 2022, a series of benchmarks showed that Cscolor’s conversion performance is on par with commercial color libraries while keeping binary size under 15 KB, making it suitable for resource‑constrained devices. The library has been cited in academic papers on computer graphics and digital image processing, and is used in hobbyist firmware for LED lighting control, educational tools for color theory, and tooling for UI design systems.