Pick a colour from an image
Read the exact colour of any pixel as HEX, RGB or HSL, and build a palette by clicking.
Drop an image to start
Runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Point at any part of the picture and the panel shows what colour is actually there, in the three notations a stylesheet or a design tool will accept. Clicking keeps it, and every colour kept lines up underneath, so pulling five colours out of a photograph or a screenshot is five clicks rather than five round trips through a separate application.
The reading comes from the image at its own resolution, not from the version scaled to fit your screen. That distinction matters more than it sounds: a picker that samples the displayed pixel returns whatever the browser invented between two real ones while resizing, which on a detailed image is a colour that appears nowhere in the file.
HSL is there because it is the notation you edit in. Hue, saturation and lightness are three numbers that mean something, so a lighter version of a brand colour is one of them changed by ten — where the same edit in HEX means changing all six digits and hoping. HEX is what you paste, HSL is what you reason with, and both describe the same pixel.
Step by step
- 1Drop in the image.
- 2Move the pointer over it to read colours, and click to keep one.
- 3Copy the notation you need — HEX, RGB or HSL.
Questions
Can I pick a colour from anywhere on my screen?
No — only from an image you drop in. Screen-wide picking needs a browser API that only some browsers have, and a permission prompt every time.
Why does the colour differ from my design tool?
Usually a colour profile. A photo tagged with a wide-gamut profile is displayed converted, while the pixel values read here are the ones stored in the file.
What happens on a transparent pixel?
You get the colour underneath the transparency as stored in the file. The alpha channel is not reported, so a fully transparent area still reads as some colour.
Is the image uploaded?
No. It is decoded and read inside this tab, and the pixels never leave your machine.