Looks fine to me

[andrewducker]

Here you will find colourmatch, which takes a selected colour and gives you other colours that go well with it. I'm most impressed by how well it works - and I wonder what this tells us about the way the human eye/mind perceives colours.

Comments

[davecleghorn.livejournal.com]

Andy, that’s brilliant. All the shades compliment each other. Be using that for the site I’m working on.

Cheers

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

As far as I know, what colours 'go' together is a purely mechanical function of the primary colour mix of which they are composed. I assume that this site uses the primary colours for light (red/green/blue) since it is displayed on a monitor. For pigment you would use red/yellow/blue.

Colurs 'go' depending on what they have in common, so (I'll talk pigment rather than light as that is what I am most familiar with, but the principle still applies).

red+yellow = orange
red+blue = purple
blue+yellow = green

Browns come from a mix of all three.

With pigment you can also add white or black (tricker with light, at least I couldn't effectively explain it)

Two colours will 'clash' (not 'go') if they have no primary colour in common. (kind of like chords have to have a note in common to make them sound good coming one after the other).
eg. yellow and purple, blue and orange, red and green.

These colour pairings are those which are each others afterimage (stare at a red (printed) square for a bit then look at a white piece of paper and you get a green afterimage) which causes each colour to look far more intense when next to each other (presumably due to the fact that we move our eyes a lot without being aware of it).

Pure primary colours are Ok together (if a bit bold and unimaginative a colour scheme IMHO).

Of course human taste can override this and like stuff that tecnhically clashes (I quite like yellow and purple together, personally).

I'm constantly surprised that most people don't seem to know how colours are mixed from primary clours and which makes which. (I can only suppose that I messed around with paints and optical effects more than most kids, and am a person who always looks for laws/principles in how stuff works).

[diffrentcolours]

Mathematical, algorithmic approaches to this are surprisingly different - I studied computer colour theory for my degree and the RGB co-ordinate system used by most computer stuff is bloody useless for things that interact with humans. There are some appropriate colour spaces, but the transforms between them are incredibly nasty, especially the four-dimensional and five-dimensional ones. Working with them is hard. A well-done implementation is... better than I managed :)

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

I bow to your experience. I freely admit that i only know about it from a pigment angle and what works as paint often doesn't work on screen, for reasons obvious and obscure.

Of course one must alway take into account the colour-blind (of all varieties) - who are surprisingly common.

I assume a 4(5) dimensional colour space is one where you try to find 4(5) harmonising colours???

[diffrentcolours]

No, it refers to the number of variables you need to refer to a single colour. Any colour in the RGB colour space can be represented by how much red, how much green and how much blue there is in the colour - black is (0, 0, 0) and white is (1, 1, 1), while pure red is (1, 0, 0).

One dimensional colour systems can be represented as a line, say from black through grey to white. Two dimensional can be represented as a flat surface. Three dimensional as a solid object. Four dimensional and five dimensional things are much more mind-boggling to visualise.

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

Ah. So 5 would be the max, would it not? Again, at least for pigment. (well unless you want to get all metallic...).

Are you saying that there are colours that you can't represent in RGB?? That seems right. The 3 colour CRT/LCD system is inherently not as flexible as the more analogue pigment colour system.

[diffrentcolours]

Well, five is the most I've dealt with. More may be possible, I'm not sure.

There are indeed colours that can't be represented adequately by RGB. Gold is a good one, although you can make a good approximation.

The colour space I ended up dealing with was designed to closely map human perception of colour. It was sodding horrible.