What a olive screen is used for
- Muted, natural backgrounds for photography
- Low-glare ambient light with a warm cast
- Checking red and green together at mid output
Olive screen online: #808000 at full screen
Olive is what yellow becomes at half brightness: #808000, red and green both at 50%, blue at zero. Like brown, it demonstrates that darkness changes the name of a colour — nobody looking at this field would call it yellow, but that is exactly what it is.
It is a comfortable background colour precisely because it is muted. Bright yellow is fatiguing to look at; olive carries the same warmth at a fraction of the intensity.
With blue at zero it retains yellow’s diagnostic property: any blue in this field points at a stuck subpixel.
How to get a full screen olive 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.