javascript - How to check if hex color is "too black"?

Question

I'm trying to evaluate the darkness of a color chosen by a color picker to see if it's "too black", and if so, set it to white. I thought I could use the first characters of the hex value to pull this off. It's working, but it's switching some legitimately "light" colors too.

I have code doing this:

        if (lightcolor.substring(0,3) == "#00"|| lightcolor.substring(0,3) == "#010"){
            lightcolor="#FFFFFF";
            color=lightcolor;
        }

There must be a more efficient way with hex math to know that a color has gone beyond a certain level of darkness? Like if lightcolor + "some hex value" <= "some hex value" then set it to white.

I have tinyColor added, which might be of use for this, but I don't know for sure.

Answer 1

You have to extract the three RGB components individually, and then use a standard formula to convert the resulting RGB values into their perceived brightness.

Assuming a six character colour:

var c = c.substring(1);      // strip #
var rgb = parseInt(c, 16);   // convert rrggbb to decimal
var r = (rgb >> 16) & 0xff;  // extract red
var g = (rgb >>  8) & 0xff;  // extract green
var b = (rgb >>  0) & 0xff;  // extract blue

var luma = 0.2126 * r + 0.7152 * g + 0.0722 * b; // per ITU-R BT.709

if (luma < 40) {
    // pick a different colour
}

EDIT

Since May 2014 tinycolor now has a getBrightness() function, albeit using the CCIR601 weighting factors instead of the ITU-R ones above.

EDIT

The resulting luma value range is 0..255, where 0 is the darkest and 255 is the lightest. Values greater than 128 are considered light by tinycolor. (shamelessly copied from the comments by @pau.moreno and @Alnitak)