Sky Blue Screen
Fill your whole display with sky blue in one click. Nothing to install, nothing uploaded.
Sky Blue wallpaper
What a sky blue screen is for
Sky blue is a pale, desaturated blue, calm enough to leave on screen for long periods. Pale blues also show banding readily, since the steps between adjacent shades are small.
Why the sky is this colour
Sunlight scatters off air molecules far more strongly at short wavelengths than long ones, an effect that varies with roughly the inverse fourth power of wavelength. Blue light is therefore scattered across the whole sky while red passes more directly through, so the sky away from the sun looks blue and the sun near the horizon, seen through much more atmosphere, looks red. Violet is scattered even more strongly than blue, but the eye is much less sensitive to it and the sun emits less of it, so the sky reads as blue rather than violet.
A pale blue on a screen
Sky blue is blue at high output with red and green raised substantially, which places it among the lighter colours. The pale blues are unusual in being both light and unmistakably coloured, where most light colours read as tinted whites. That makes it a useful background: bright enough for dark text to meet contrast requirements comfortably, coloured enough not to feel clinical.
What it shows about a display
Light blues are a reasonable test of colour temperature, because the eye is well practised at judging whether a sky looks right. A panel running warm renders sky blue noticeably grey or lilac, and one with a strong cool cast exaggerates it. It is also one of the fields where banding shows readily on a screen displaying a gradient, though a flat field like this one will look smooth regardless.
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.
Sky Blue color values
The exact values for this shade, if you need to match it somewhere else.
| Hex | #87CEEB |
|---|---|
| RGB | 135, 206, 235 |
| HSL | 197°, 71%, 73% |
| CMYK | 43%, 12%, 0%, 8% |
| Contrast on white | 1.74:1 |
| Contrast on black | 12.06:1 |
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. Sky Blue reaches that bar on black.
Colors close to sky blue
Measured as perceived difference, not by name, so these are the shades that genuinely sit nearest sky blue 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 sky blue 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 sky blue screen?
This page uses #87CEEB. The same value is shown in RGB, HSL and CMYK further down, so you can match this exact shade somewhere else.
Does a sky blue screen save battery?
No, and on an OLED or AMOLED screen a light color costs more power than a dark one, because every pixel has to be lit. If battery life is the goal, use the black screen instead.
Can I download this sky blue 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.