from the desk of stinkpot

it’s surprisingly easy to desaturate colors in matlab.  the trick is to use the HSV (hue, saturation, value) transformation to do so.  for instance, to desaturate the color blue ([0 0 1] in RGB-speak) by 25%, use the following commands:

>> desat = [1 0.75 1];

>> blue_desat = hsv2rgb(desat.*rgb2hsv([0 0 1]));