Olive Screen
Fill your whole display with olive in one click. Nothing to install, nothing uploaded.
Olive wallpaper
What a olive screen is for
Olive is a dark yellow: red and green at equal, reduced strength with no blue at all. It is a useful test of mid-tone reproduction, since any blue leakage in the panel shows immediately as the color turning grey or green.
Dark yellow, which is why it looks unusual
Olive is what yellow becomes at low brightness, and it is one of the clearest cases of a colour that changes name rather than simply darkening. Dark red is still called red, dark blue is still blue, but dark yellow reads as an entirely separate colour with no obvious relationship to the bright version. On a display it is red and green at moderate output with blue very low, which is exactly yellow with the brightness taken out.
Why armies chose it
Olive drab became standard military clothing because it approximates the average of temperate vegetation, which is not the vivid green of a single leaf but a muted yellow-green once light, shadow and dead material are averaged together. Camouflage works by matching that overall tone rather than by mimicking any particular plant, which is why saturated green performs badly in the field and a drab, desaturated shade performs well.
As a screen background
Olive is dark and low in saturation, which makes it one of the more restful colours to have filling a display for a long period. Light text works on it and dark text does not. Like other three-channel mixtures at partial output, it is a reasonably demanding thing for a panel to render: a screen with a colour cast pushes olive toward brown or toward green, and comparing it against khaki will show whether the display separates them.
Click the panel above to go fullscreen and press Esc to come back. The color is drawn by your browser, so nothing is installed and nothing is uploaded.
Olive color values
The exact values for this shade, if you need to match it somewhere else.
| Hex | #808000 |
|---|---|
| RGB | 128, 128, 0 |
| HSL | 60°, 100%, 25% |
| CMYK | 0%, 0%, 100%, 50% |
| Contrast on white | 4.2:1 |
| Contrast on black | 5.01:1 |
Contrast ratios follow the WCAG formula. Anything at or above 4.5:1 is readable as body text against that background, and 3:1 is the floor for large headings. Olive reaches that bar on black.
Colors close to olive
Measured as perceived difference, not by name, so these are the shades that genuinely sit nearest olive to the eye.
Questions
Does this work on a phone?
Yes. On mobile the page fills the screen when you tap the panel. Some browsers keep a thin status bar visible, which is a browser limit rather than something the page controls.
Will a olive screen fix a stuck pixel?
Sometimes. A stuck pixel is lit in one color and can occasionally be freed by cycling colors rapidly for a few minutes. A dead pixel receives no power at all and cannot be recovered in software.
What is the hex code for this olive screen?
This page uses #808000. The same value is shown in RGB, HSL and CMYK further down, so you can match this exact shade somewhere else.
Does a olive screen save battery?
Not meaningfully. Only black saves power, and only on OLED and AMOLED panels where an unlit pixel is genuinely off. Any lit color, including a dark one, draws power.
Can I download this olive as a wallpaper?
Yes. There is a ready-made 1920 by 1080 PNG on this page, and the panel above will generate the same color at your own screen size, at 1440p or 4K, or at phone dimensions. No watermark and no sign-up.
Is it free?
Yes, and there is no sign-up. The page draws a color; that is the whole tool.