"Distance" between colours in PHP

Question

I'm looking for a function that can accurately represent the distance between two colours as a number or something.

For example I am looking to have an array of HEX values or RGB arrays and I want to find the most similar colour in the array for a given colour

eg. I pass a function a RGB value and the 'closest' colour in the array is returned

Answer 1

Each color is represented as a tuple in the HEX code. To determine close matches you need to subtract each RGB component separately.

Example:

Color 1: #112233 
Color 2: #122334
Color 3: #000000

Difference between color1 and color2: R=1,  G=1   B=1  = 0x3 
Difference between color3 and color1: R=11, G=22, B=33 = 0x66

So color 1 and color 2 are closer than
1 and 3.

edit

So you want the closest named color? Create an array with the hex values of each color, iterate it and return the name. Something like this;

function getColor($rgb)
{
    // these are not the actual rgb values
    $colors = array(BLUE =>0xFFEEBB, RED => 0x103ABD, GREEN => 0x123456);

    $largestDiff = 0;
    $closestColor = "";
    foreach ($colors as $name => $rgbColor)
    {
        if (colorDiff($rgbColor,$rgb) > $largestDiff)
        {
            $largestDiff = colorDiff($rgbColor,$rgb);
            $closestColor = $name;
        }

    }
    return $closestColor;

}

function colorDiff($rgb1,$rgb2)
{
    // do the math on each tuple
    // could use bitwise operates more efficiently but just do strings for now.
    $red1   = hexdec(substr($rgb1,0,2));
    $green1 = hexdec(substr($rgb1,2,2));
    $blue1  = hexdec(substr($rgb1,4,2));

    $red2   = hexdec(substr($rgb2,0,2));
    $green2 = hexdec(substr($rgb2,2,2));
    $blue2  = hexdec(substr($rgb2,4,2));

    return abs($red1 - $red2) + abs($green1 - $green2) + abs($blue1 - $blue2) ;

}