gHacks technology news » color picker http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Portable Color Chooser http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/13/portable-color-chooser/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/13/portable-color-chooser/#comments Sat, 13 Sep 2008 12:09:26 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=6971 If you have ever worked with colors before, be it in an image editor or while designing a website, you might have experienced troubles picking the right color. Maybe you have seen a nice color in an image, application or website and would like to pick the exact same color for your project as well. Image editors are only able to pick colors from images that have been loaded into them but they cannot tell you the color that an application uses.

You could make a screenshot of that application, load that into the image editor and pick the color that way or you could use a color chooser like Pixel Pick to do that for you in a fraction of the time.

Pixel Pick (via Instant Fundas) is a portable application which is running fine on the Windows XP test system and it should run fine on other Windows versions as well. The software developer does not provide information about compatibility on his website.

color chooser

Choosing a color is a simple process. Pixel Pick immediately displays the colors that are beneath the cursor. The user can set the application to be always on top which is probably a good idea. It is still hard tp pick the exact pixel which is why Pixel Pick comes with a screen magnifier that makes it much easier to pick the right color from the area that you are investigating.

The color chooser is displaying the color information as hex, rgb, cmyk and hsb plus the exact position of the pixel on the screen. Each value can be copied with a left-click so that it can be imported into the image editor or another application that requires the input.

color picker

The software program comes with a history of the latest 36 colors that have been saved by the user. This list can be exported.

It took a while before it became apparent how the history function was working. Here is a tip that will speed up the process for you.

After moving the mouse on a pixel that should be examined you need to press a key on the keyboard to add that pixel to the history. The application will automatically switch to the next box in the pixel history (remember there are 36) and the user can use the mouse again to pick a pixel on the screen.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/13/portable-color-chooser/feed/ 4 Grab any color from your Firefox session http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/11/grab-any-color-from-your-firefox-session/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/11/grab-any-color-from-your-firefox-session/#comments Tue, 11 Dec 2007 09:10:04 +0000 Daniel Pataki http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/11/grab-any-color-from-your-firefox-session/ As an amateur html and CSS enthusiast I see colors and schemes that I really like sometimes and when I’m trying to find the best colors to suit my sites I want to try these out. It’s usually very fiddly to find out these colors without special tools, but I have found a great Firefox extension to do the work for me.

Until now you could right click -> view source on a page and then try and find the relevant section and take a look at the color codes there. This might take a bit long if there is a large css file and it may be confusing for those who don’t know anything about CSS. Alternatively you could take a screenshot, paste it into Photoshop or Paint.net and find out what color you’re looking at using the color picker.

Using the Colorzilla Firefox extension however brings you a lot closer to these colors. After installation you can find a small color picker on the bottom left. If you click on it once and click anywhere on the page you will get a lot of information. The latest version shows you RGB info, Hex color info, cursor position, and also the place in the CSS file where the color is.


The info is also shown in a very user friendly way, in the status bar at the bottom, so no pop-up dialogs (which I hate) and no need to click through menus. If you click on the icon twice you find a color palette where you can pick colors, perfect for comparing and picking close colors.

While I appreciate that this isn’t a tool for the masses, I found it extremely useful in the few cases I needed it, it saved me a whole lot of time and frustration.

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