How to tune up colors in web page

Question

Could you advise me some techniques and tools that you use to tune up colors in a web site? The website has background and there are some images with logos. If I change the background I need to change other things too but it's difficult to change the image of logo (I'd like to change only some colors in logo, e.g. to change white color in that image to slightly yellow color etc.). Are there some tools for this problems? I can use Gimp on my Linux machine, if it's able to do this. Are there tools that help with colors that are suitable to live together for individual part of the web (header, background, footer, sidebars, color of links). The web should be cheery. I don't have experience with playing with colors for web design yet

thank you for help

Answer 1

Here are a couple of links to articles with links to many tools

http://thedesignmag.com/27-color-tools-and-resource-for-choosing-the-right-color-palette.html

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/07/02/25-free-color-tools-apps-and-palette-generators/

Answer 2

I like using visibone. It's been a while since I used it, but they used to have an online service where you can compare the color contrast between colors that you choose on their web app. Nice for seeing the horrible contrasts that I usually thought would be good.

Answer 3

Have you tried Adobe Kuler? ( http://kuler.adobe.com )

A nice site for generating colour schemes :)

Answer 4

Find a colour you like and do a search in colourlovers.

Also on a simple scale (I'm no designer) but changing from thinking in RGB to HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) is a great way to produce gradients of colours that you like - its explained well in this post: Why programmers suck at picking colours.

A better way to model color is the HSV color space (sometimes called HSB: hue, saturation and brightness): most color-picking dialogs of graphic programs have an HSV mode and it’s clearly much better than RBG because it allows you to easily go back to the ‘linear contrast’ strategy by just changing the brightness and keeping hue and saturation fixed.But now you’ve turned a grayscale UI into a monochromatic one, not that much of an improvement.