chromatic

IPA: kroʊmˈætɪk

Uses relating to colour
(not comparable) Characterized or caused by, or relating to, colour or hue.
(comparable) Brightly coloured; colourful, vivid.
(not comparable, optics) Having the capacity to separate spectral colours by refraction.
(not comparable, music)
(Ancient Greece, historical) One of three types of tetrachord (the others being the diatonic and enharmonic), with an interval between half and four-fifths of the total interval of a tetrachord.
Relating to or using notes not belonging to the diatonic scale of the key in which a passage of music is written.
(biology) Relating to chromatin (“a complex of DNA, RNA, and proteins within the cell nucleus out of which chromosomes condense during cell division”).

Examples of "chromatic" in Sentences

The term chromatic derives from the Greek word chroma, meaning color.
Saturation refers to chromatic purity, or freedom from dilution with white.
For today we chose to share with you this playful set of tea cup stools, which ranks high in chromatic but also originality.
By far the most common causes of prismatic color, in otherwise carefully constructed objectives, are the so-called chromatic aberrations of second or higher order.
His work supplies not only the very basis of the Impressionist movement proper, but of all that has followed it and will follow it in the study of the so-called chromatic laws.
To overcome this difficulty (called chromatic aberration) telescope glasses were made small and of very long focus: some of them so long that they had no tube, all of them egregiously cumbrous.
John, to your last question, yes, I think a painting keyed heavily to a color family contributes to a photographic impression, because our own visual system has a "white balance" function called chromatic adaptation, which automatically corrects for a color cast.
I would be curious to know whether composers who work with just intonation came to it through diatonicism and then realized how cool it would be to adapt it to chromaticism, or whether they were chromatic from the start and just continually dissatisfied with the equal-tempered results.