Question: I want users on my website to be able to pick a hex colour, and I just want to display white text for dark colours and black text for light colours. Can you work out the brightness from a hex code (preferably PHP)?

Answer: 
I know this is a very old topic, but for users who came from "Google Search", this link may be what they are looking for. I've searched for something like this and I think it's a good idea to post it here:

<https://github.com/mexitek/phpColors>

```
use Mexitek\PHPColors\Color;
// Initialize my color
$myBlue = new Color("#336699");

echo $myBlue->isLight(); // false
echo $myBlue->isDark(); // true

```

That's it.
I tried a different approach to this, I used HSL (hue, saturation & lightness) lightness percentage to check if the color is dark or light. (like @chrisf said in his answer)

**function:**

```
function colorislight($hex) {
   $hex       = str_replace('#', '', $hex);
   $r         = (hexdec(substr($hex, 0, 2)) / 255);
   $g         = (hexdec(substr($hex, 2, 2)) / 255);
   $b         = (hexdec(substr($hex, 4, 2)) / 255);
   $lightness = round((((max($r, $g, $b) + min($r, $g, $b)) / 2) * 100));
   return ($lightness >= 50 ? true : false);
}

```

On the return line it checks if the lightness percentage is higher than 50% and returns true otherwise false is returned. You can easily change it to return true if the color has 30% lightness and so on. The `$lightness` variable can return from 0 to 100 0 being the darkest and 100 being the lightest.

**how to use the function:**

```
$color = '#111111';
if ( colorislight($color) ) {
   echo 'this color is light';
}
else {
   echo 'this color is dark';
}

```