Reverse opposing colors

Question

I have a user setup where they can choose the colors of the alerts. the Alert is the background color on a text or button. But the problem comes in that if they select a dark blue and we have black letters the contrast isnt enough and you cannot read it.

I have tried to make a function to get the reverse opposing color but havent got too far.

Is there such a function?

Answer 1

I found that the best solution for me is to convert the RGB values into YIQ values. As we are only interested in the brightness value (represented by Y), there is one single calculation to be done: Y = (299*R + 587*G + 114*B)/1000. The Java code for that would look like this:

public static Color getContrastColor(Color color) {
  double y = (299 * color.getRed() + 587 * color.getGreen() + 114 * color.getBlue()) / 1000;
  return y >= 128 ? Color.black : Color.white;
}

You can see that it simply decides to use black or white, based upon the brightness of the original color. And the result works very nice in my opinion. The weights (299, 587, 114) are proportional to the sensitivity of the eyes (or rather the sensitivity of the retina) to the corresponding color.