Quick and Easy Color Picker
Posted in Cool, Downloadable by Dan at 10:25 am
This post was published 1 year 9 months 28 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.
Neat little find for graphic designers out there. Instant Eyedropper helps identify any color that is displayed on your screen. Just left click and hold the system tray application and drag the little window over the pixel that you want pick up coloring information on.
To make things even easier Instant Eyedropper automatically takes the HTML color or RGB color and puts it into your clipboard so you can copy and paste into your application of choice. Windows Only, Free.
Mac OS X comes with DigitalColor Meter, an app that does essentially the same thing. Look in /Applications/Utilities
Mac OS X only, you already have it.
thanks Dan…….. sadly I needed this a week ago…….. but I don’t know if I might need it again……
another awesome one is critical matter’s colorpicker pro (it’s not free, but its well worth the moola): http://www.criticalmatter.com/colorpickerpro/index.html
sorry, osx only on that one.
firefox extension has been doing this for like 3 or 4 years, it’s part of my “ok I have firefox now I need my tools” actions after install
…. and it’s free…. and it works on every platform… booyah
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/271
chad, yeah the firefox one is neat for when you must have firefox open too; i guess i’ve just gotten used to having a standalone version of a full featured color picker.
for windows, i use nattyware’s pixie.
@seth
Yea, well I’m a web developer with design tendencies so firefox is always open when I need some color picking, but I see what you mean.
There’s a Windows program called colour pixie or something I used to use doing this.
Thanks for the info
The comments you get on your site are so unhelpful , I wonder why you or they bother to carry on.
Anyway, keep on keeping on…
Perfect. I always have to print script + open photoshop and that whole insane list of actions to get a simple color that I want.
Thanks so much!
Nattyware’s Pixie is the best color picker for Windows – I wish it had an OS X version but the developer has already commented (can’t remember where?) that it will not be ported to OS X. If you are using Windows, go get Pixie.
Pixie has a tiny footprint and quick and easy key board shortcuts:
– copy the currently hovered color to your clipboard
– zoom in on the hovered area (for easy copying of color)
Color Picker Pro for Mac OS X looks about as good.
Color Picker Pro Cons:
– Costs $17.95 more than Pixie
– The UI is too large side taking up precious screen realestate
– remove zoom and make it a shortcut – see Pixie!
– remove the permanent palette and make a shortcut – see Pixie!
– Clumsy Copt yo Clipboard process
– Color Picker Pro requires two different key strokes to get a color to your OS X clipboard. First you must press a “Capture” shortcut, then you must press a “Copy” shortcut to ‘Copy’ what you just ‘Captured.” Why? If Color Picker had a shortcut to copy the hovered color (like Pixie) instantly, it would be worth the price.