Finding the right color palette is a daunting task for any designer – especially to an amateur like me. Here go some great online tools to help you out.

Adobe Kuler

- found via Digital Inspiration
An useful Flash application for designers to draft up a color scheme for designing. Adobe Kuler works completely inside the web browser – no downloads, no installation – but you can download colors schemes on your hard drive or share them with other designers. Start by choosing a base color either by clicking the color wheel spectrum or manually typing the RGB, HEX or CMYK value – Kuler will than generate matching colors for you depending on the style you have selected. You can refine the generated colors again by typing the color values or dragging the sliders or through the color wheel itself.

Ercan Cem’s Digital World pointed out another similar type of web based application:

The Color Wizard – Ver. 3.0

The Color Wizard is a color matching application for anyone who wants to create designs with great looking colors. The color wizard lets you submit your own base color, and it automatically returns matching colors for the one you selected.

It returns a set of hue, saturation and tint/shade variations of your color, as well as suggests color schemets to you, based on your color’s complementary color, split complementary colors, analogous colors and other variations. The color wizard also has a randomize function that lets you generate color schemes you might not have thought of on your own.

Also you can generate your own color palette by a low tech way – pixelate a photo

How many times have you sat down to start on a design and gone crazy trying to choose a color palette? What if you could just give photoshop a picture…

.. just fire up Photoshop®. Get your images ready and go to “Filters > Mosaic > Pixelate”. You might want to adjust the size of the pixels to get just a few colors or a lot of colors..

Here goes a nifty article / tutorial on Color Theory from Worqx.com

Why study color theory? If you are involved in the creation or design of visual documents, an understanding of color will help when incorporating it into your own designs. Choices regarding color often seem rather mystical, as many seem to base decisions on nothing other than “it looks right.” Although often told I had an eye for color, the reason why some colors worked together while others did not always intrigued me and I found the study of color theory fascinating.

And a great introduction to color theories in a great Flash animation : Colors in Motion