Color Tools

Some people can come up with gorgeous color schemes out of thin air. The rest of us are guys. These sites can help a lot.

Twyst's Color Match Remix
Based on Color Match 5K, shows 9 colors that go together plus a little preview window so you can see how your choices will look on a typical web page. There's also a widget that lets you save your color scheme, and you can look at color schemes other people have saved.
Eric Meyer's Color Blender
You choose two colors as endpoints and the number of midpoints you want (from 1 to 10), and it returns that number of evenly spaced midpoints between the endpoint colors.
Jemima Pereira's 4096 Color Wheel
Shows, for any color you choose, the nearest web-safe and web-smart colors and collects up to 7 selections. What are web-safe and web-smart colors? Look here.
Defence Mechanism's Color Toy
A cute Flash applet that produces a palette of colors from your selection, or let it pick a starting color randomly.
Pixy's Color Scheme
Select a color and it gives you a monochromatic, contrast (base + complement), soft contrast (split complements), double-contrast (2 neighbors + complements) or analogic (base + neighbors) color scheme.
EasyRGB
Pick a color, choose Color Harmonizer, and it will give you a dozen colors that go with it. Other tools include finding equivalents in different manufacturers' paint catalogs, converting between color spaces, monitor calibration, and converting between computer colors and real world colors.
KohaiStyle's QuickColor
Another color palette calculator in Flash, a little bit different from the others.
Web Colors Homepage
Articles on color for the Web and several applets for computing color.
MoreCrayons
An excellent source for the Web-smart colors: articles and applets.
ColorWhore
Subtitled "A directory of nice colors", and that's just what it is. If you've got a favorite, you can add it.
ColorSchemer
ColorSchemer is a shareware tool currently priced at US$34.95. The link is to the online version of their tool.
HTMLcolor
My own little Windows app. Pick a color and it gets copied to the clipboard. Yawn. The only saving grace is that I include source code, so maybe you can turn it into something more interesting.
Technicolor
And yet another. This one's clever: hover above the R, G, and B bars and the colors (an even dozen, chosen to go well together) change, and you see a ghostly image of where the value will change to when you click.
Color Match 5K
You select a color using RGB sliders and it shows you a palette of 6 colors that go together.
Behr Explore Color
From the paint and home decorating company Behr. Requires free registration. Their Inspiration Library has a lot of good color schemes, some of which seem to translate pretty well to the web.
Colorspeak
Colors evoke feelings and memories. This site isn't about how to work color, but about how color works. Read others' reactions ("listen") or add some of your own ("speak") for any of the colors on a 6 × 6 × 6 palette.
graFX Freeware Colortools
20 freeware (some adware) Windows graphics tools. These are little gems. So far I can definitely recommend addcolor by WDG Team, but the others look very tempting.
Iconio Color Picker
A great little eyedropper kind of program for Windows that lets you pick several colors (e.g., from a photo) at the same time, and can save palettes of colors at the same time.
Pixie
By Nattyware. Cute little free Windows app. Cruise around through photos or on the net, move your mouse pointer over a color, hit the hotkeys and snap — the HTML for the color goes to the clipboard, or you get a color control to tweak the color some more, or you get a magnifier.
Pixel2Pixel
Lets you change palette colors in a smallish GIF image (288 × 288) with no more than 64 colors in its palette. Still, editing palettes is such a pain in most graphics programs we know, it's probably worth remembering this site.
Pantone to RGB Chart
Roy Reed of Reed Design has made this table showing conversions for common PMS names and numbers to RGB (0-255) and hex (0-FF) HTML values. I'm a little shaky on what color space he's using, since one of the colors I'm pretty familiar with, Warm Red, looks a lot more orange on my monitor than it does on the printed page, but this is still an excellent chart: the colors in the chart are usable.
Web Based Color Tools
Kellan's list on Laughing Meme. We love meta-lists! Other people update them, and we don't have to!
WordColor
Utterly at a loss what color to make your web page? Douwe Osinga's delightful little Windows program WordColor looks up a word you type (surely you can think of a word to describe your page!) in Google's image search, then returns the "average" color. Works good.
Color Palette Creator
Steve's tool at Slayeroffice. Based on Andy Clarke's article at Stuff and Nonsense.
Barevné schéma
Pixy (Petr Staniček) rides again! This 1- through 4-color applet lets you adjust the distance between your complementary colors.
Website Tips on Color
Articles (including Lynda Weinman on Web-safe colors), color charts, swatches, and a myriad of links. The best place to start for colors.
Hex Color Calculation Experiments
By Patrick Lauke (Splintered). Shows diluted tints of a given color (you supply a hex R, G, and B) and their complements. Lots of good possibilities in the results.
Krassy's List of Color Tools
A meta-list by Krassy Lyakov.
Colour Expansion and Comparison
Kym Kovan put a really nice interface on the formulas from EasyRGB to create this versatile comparer, complement generator, midpoint finder, pocket tweezers, and fish scaler.
PMS to RGB and Hex Charts
At SEO Consultants. They offer a caveat that these are approximations, but that's terrific. Imagine the squinting it took to produce these charts. And as an encore, a chart of web-safe colors you can mouse over and it'll show you the shortcut hex value and also set the background to that color.
Colours on the Web
Donald Johannsson's tutorial on colors. Don't miss his "Spin the Colour Wheel" which can place your choices in the hands of fate. Well, you get to nudge the wheel of fortune as it spins.
ColourLovers
Some whacky color-lovin' people who are making up new colors (well, new names, but plucking them out of the spectrum and saying "Look at this!", which is neat) and palettes.
Color Harmonizer
From Interactive Earth. The online version has 3 "progressions" like the I-IV-V in music. We're waiting for I-vi-IV-V and ii-V7-I-vi so we can decorate our web pages like "Heart and Soul" and "Chopsticks". There's also something about using the golden mean for the ratios. This can produce some more vivid combinations than the more strictly color-complement tools, but needless to say, don't go overboard. There's also a downloadable version for US$20.
ColorCombos
Has libraries of color combinations, a random color combo generator, and a combo tester.