How do you determine what color matches another?

Say I throw out a random color like #3080c0. What color matches it such that the two together look good? e.g. What's a good background color to #3080c0 as a foreground color?

like color schemes?

I'm possibly looking for complimentary, but that site's complimentary uses 5 colors, and it doesn't quite tell how it's generated. Is the hue just shifted by like 90 or 180 or whatever it is?

GAMEchief wrote:

I'm possibly looking for complimentary, but that site's complimentary uses 5 colors, and it doesn't quite tell how it's generated. Is the hue just shifted by like 90 or 180 or whatever it is?

complimentary is across the color wheel so 180

I did some research and this was a snippet i found.

<?PHP

 

FUNCTION inverseHex( $color )

{

     $color       = TRIM($color);

     $prependHash = FALSE;

 

     IF(STRPOS($color,'#')!==FALSE) {

          $prependHash = TRUE;

          $color       = STR_REPLACE('#',NULL,$color);

     }

 

     SWITCH($len=STRLEN($color)) {

          CASE 3:

               $color=PREG_REPLACE("/(.)(.)(.)/","\\1\\1\\2\\2\\3\\3",$color);

          CASE 6:

               BREAK;

          DEFAULT:

               TRIGGER_ERROR("Invalid hex length ($len). Must be (3) or (6)", E_USER_ERROR);

     }

 

     IF(!PREG_MATCH('/[a-f0-9]{6}/i',$color)) {

          $color = HTMLENTITIES($color);

          TRIGGER_ERROR( "Invalid hex string #$color", E_USER_ERROR );

     }

 

     $r = DECHEX(255-HEXDEC(SUBSTR($color,0,2)));

     $r = (STRLEN($r)>1)?$r:'0'.$r;

     $g = DECHEX(255-HEXDEC(SUBSTR($color,2,2)));

     $g = (STRLEN($g)>1)?$g:'0'.$g;

     $b = DECHEX(255-HEXDEC(SUBSTR($color,4,2)));

     $b = (STRLEN($b)>1)?$b:'0'.$b;

 

     RETURN ($prependHash?'#':NULL).$r.$g.$b;

}

 

// Demo

// echo inverseHex('#000000'); // #ffffff

?>

Hope this helps ya chief

da fuck is inverse. 180 away on the color wheel?

GAMEchief wrote:

da fuck is inverse. 180 away on the color wheel?

ya right across
like orange - blue
red - green
purple - yellow

What about lightness? Wouldn't you reverse it? I assume that'd just be the absolute value of 255 minus the original color's lightness.

ugh i wanted to use rgb for the math, not hsl

idk #'s man
y u gotta make it about numbers

Writing algorithms mang.