What a brown screen is used for
- Warm, muted backgrounds for photography and product shots
- Low-brightness ambient lighting that does not glare
- Design reference for earth-tone palettes
Brown screen online: #A52A2A at full screen
Brown is the colour that reveals how much of vision is contextual. There is no brown light: brown is simply dark orange, and it only reads as brown because of what surrounds it. Show this field on its own in a dark room and it looks like a dull red. Put a bright white next to it and it snaps into brown.
That makes it a poor test colour but a useful background one. Muted, dark and low in contrast, it sits behind photographed objects without competing with them, and it is easy to look at for long periods.
The default here is #A52A2A, the CSS colour named brown, which is redder than most people expect. Chocolate (#7B3F00) and tan (#D2B48C) are closer to what many people picture; both are reachable from the hex box.
How to get a full screen brown background
Press the fullscreen button on the player above, or the F key. Escape returns you to the page. On a desktop browser F11 does the same job and hides the browser's own toolbars as well.
The colour box is a control, not a picture: use the hex field to enter any value, pick another shade from the palette, or download the current colour as a PNG at your screen's resolution. Whatever you set is written into the address bar, so the link you copy reproduces exactly what you are looking at.