Are there any color palette choosing tools that make it easy to incorporate black/gray/white?

Question

I always have a difficult time choosing color schemes and I think I often end up overloading my designs with color because there's "just something missing." Today I realized that part of the problem is that I often overlook using black and white as a choice. I use Kuler and Color Scheme Designer a lot (and have used various others over the years), but I've yet to see one actually incorporate black, white, and/or gray into the color wheel/harmony and, as a result, none of them would help me find a color scheme like this:

Ideally, I'd like to find a tool that does that (preferably free for personal use). I will also accept strategies for using the tools I already use to incorporate black and white more easily.

Answer 1

I was recently working with a dark interface, and struggled with choosing the right colors for quite a long time. I found most color pickers useless, to be honest, because even when they could show me a trustworthy relationship between color blocks, the final implementation would always look different.

This might not be the case for you, so this is more or less personal, but I'd recommend you try creating your own palettes incorporating some extra information (in my case, I used shapes with different sizes, and images that had a similar palette as reference).

Something that a color picker won't be able to show you is how colors interact when they are overlapping or very close to each other. For example, these colors create that annoying 'dissonance' (see comments!) when combined with the gray:

While these three (far from being perfect, this was done in a hurry), can more or less coexist in harmony:

For some elements, palettes are great. But in some cases, it's better to see how colors work together in the actual implementation ('real life' inspiration is also a good source!).

Answer 2

In addition to Yisela's answer, which I think looks like a good strategy, I would suggest using Dribbble's colour library to look at designs incorporating certain colours and get inspiration on which colours work good together.

One of the main things to keep in mind when selecting colours, especially in combination with black / grey, is not to use the richest version of a colour but rather a more bleak pastel like version of the colour that better pops out from a black / grey background, Eg:

Answer 3

I don't think you need a colour tool at all when working on such simple (and powerful) designs. If you have laid out the black and white parts, all you are likely to need is one spot colour, and then perhaps different mixtures of that with white/black. This is easy enough to experiment with directly in your software (PhotoShop, Illustrator, whatever). Put in place the most saturated version of the spot colour. Then vary the opacity of the layer. To change the hue simply go back into the application's colour picker.