Colormod makes manipulating colors easy.

Inspired by tools like Sass and Less, colormod provides wrappers using colorspace to convert, extract, and manipulate individual properties of colors. For portability, colormod primarily works with and produces colors as hexadecimal strings (although R's named colors are also supported).

Let's say you wanted to make your orange both richer (more saturated) and also a little brighter:

"#8c613f" %>% saturate(0.2) %>% lighten(0.3)

Or, you could convert that orange to greyscale:

greyscale("#8c613f")

This package is not quite ready to be available on CRAN, but you can use devtools to install the current development version:

if(!require("devtools")) install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("briandconnelly/colormod")