Check if color is dark or light in Android

Solution 1:

Android doesn't provide it, you can implement a method to determine this. Here a method to do that:

public boolean isColorDark(int color){
    double darkness = 1-(0.299*Color.red(color) + 0.587*Color.green(color) + 0.114*Color.blue(color))/255;
    if(darkness<0.5){
        return false; // It's a light color
    }else{
        return true; // It's a dark color
    }
}

Solution 2:

If you use support library v4 (or AndroidX), you can use ColorUtils.calculateLuminance(color), which returns luminance of color as float between 0.0 and 1.0.

So you can do something like:

boolean isDark(int color) {
    return ColorUtils.calculateLuminance(color) < 0.5;
}

See:

• Support library v4: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/support/v4/graphics/ColorUtils.html#calculateLuminance(int)
• AndroidX: https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/core/graphics/ColorUtils#calculateLuminance(int)

Note since Android API 24 there is also method: Color.luminance(color).

Solution 3:

public float getLightness(int color) {
    int red   = Color.red(color);
    int green = Color.green(color);
    int blue  = Color.blue(color);

    float hsl[] = new float[3];
    ColorUtils.RGBToHSL(red, green, blue, hsl);
    return hsl[2];
}

One could easily use the ColorUtils to check the lightness of a color.

if (getLightness(color) < 0.5f ){
    // This color is too dark!
}