Lighter or darker color shades from a single Color in SwiftUI

I was working on creating a custom button background for which I needed to apply a darker shade of the foreground view’s foregroundStyle. Working in SwiftUI, there are no api’s on Color out of the box that provide a solution to this problem. My search for a answers led me to StackOverflow which yielded a plethora of solutions, each involving manipulating the color components. All the solutions were great but still seemed like an overkill so before I resorted to apply any of the solutions I decided to dig deeper one more time and see if there was another way to achieve what I wanted. Turns out there is not so much a way with Color, but with View.

Checking out Apple’s official documentation, there exist modifiers for View viz.

• brightness (0.2)
• contrast (0.6)
• saturation (0.4)
• grayscale (0.6)

… etc.

As their names suggest, these modifiers affect the brightness, contrast, saturation & grayscale of a View. All you need to do is provide the amount between 0-1, that you want each of the modifiers to affect the view by. I tried each of them by applying them to a background view displayed below a foreground view that was set with foregroundStyle Color with value #79C93D. Here are the results (L-R) with modifiers applied in the following order:

• no modifier
• brightness (0.2)
• contrast (0.6)
• saturation (0.4)
• grayscale (0.6)

As you can see from the screenshots above, the modifiers if used correctly, can actually do a decent job. And the best part is, they are supported from iOS 13+. Do note that as this solution affects the entire view it’s applied on, it’s best used for views comprising of just Color. If you apply it to views containing other elements such as Text or Image, this may lead to undesired results.

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