Colors: Classification, sorting, schemes and more!

[TK.]

Hello there amazing cartographers!

I've been trying to educate myself with the guidance of many people here and with the knowledge already presented within these halls and while I still have a long, long way to go...it's been fun!

That said, one thing I didn't find much info (maybe because it's extremely basic for almost everyone here) is info about colors

Excuse if I sound extremely dumb or iliterate, but at first I didn't even had an idea of what a "tan" was...or "terracota"...or what a "oily palette" would look like. And while certainly I have a common-world knowledge of colors, many times I think I'm selecting the color my brain thinks it's the correct one and when I use it in the map it goes "WHAAAA?!?!"

I've been trying to use stuff like

http://www.colorblender.com/ to make selections and see combinations that go along well

and

http://www.rapidtables.com/web/color/color-wheel.htm to get the correct color code to the color description

But I still believe there's much left...so, in resume:

Do you guys have better sites or software to help me with colors in general, combinations, palettes and alike?

Can you guys point me to material I can read or study?

Thanks a lot!

[J.Edward]

Hey TK
Another thing you can do is find images or maps where the colors are ones that you like and sample the colors from there.
If you use photoshop or gimp, you should be able to open an image you like and use the color picker to sample colors and then paint them onto a new document and save the new doc as a color sample sheet. Then use that when you're working on a new map, or experiment with colors based off of those sampled colors.
Hope that helps.
Cheers,
J

[Hai-Etlik]

ColorBrewer is a very good tool for selecting colour schemes. You tell it what kind of information you are representing, how many classes you need to represent, whether you need to make a map that's safe for red-green colourblindness, printing, or photocopying, and it will filter its selection of colour schemes based on those requirements and display the result on some sample data. It's well known in the world of GIS and real cartography.

http://colorbrewer2.org/

[TK.]

J. Edward - Indeed, that's what I started doing to try to get the color comps I was looking for.

Hai-Etlik - colorbrewer seems awesome! Gonna try to use it more extensively to see how it improves my color matchings! Thanks

[J.Edward]

Yeah, I have found that to be very helpful when I want a look that is similar to something i've seen.
Hai-Etlik - I second that. Very cool. Bookmarked that one. Thanks for the link and info.