I found deciding on a colour scheme to be an incredibly frustrating process, and what I finally settled on was fairly safe but not very original or exciting either. However here are a few of the tools that I used to help me locate colours, palettes and inspiration, hopefully this can be useful to you too.

Adobe Kulur

My favorite because of the great community. A lot of really good palettes here and plenty of things to help you designing. Kulur refers to both the website and the AIR application which you can download here.

The AIR application has a useful feature of letting you drag schemes separately onto your desktop to compare various palettes. Once you have decided you can copy the RGB values straight onto the clipboard.

Colour Browser

Another AIR application, this one doesn’t need to be connected to the Internet and is useful as a desktop tool for storing various palettes and schemes. This tool is for creating your own palettes, not finding other peoples and is pretty simple but useful.

Color Scheme Generator 2

A color wheel you can use to create a palette from, has a number of options such as pastel, dark pastel, contrast pale etc.

ColorSchemer ColorPix

ColorPix is great. Install it and you can use it to find out what color anything on your screen is. Perfect for stealing someone else’s great scheme or creating variations. If used in conjunction with the Colour Schemer Gallery then you can really find some great ideas.