Jul 26

Color Picker

Switch ScreenshotI love IrfanView. It’s a fast, lightweight little image viewer that’s extremely capable for basic tasks, (that is, anything I don’t want to bother starting up Photoshop for). But the one feature it doesn’t have is the ability to click a spot on an image and get the HTML color value. Photoshop does this, but instead of just giving you the color (i.e. #CCBB00), it gives you a color attribute (i.e. COLOR=”#CCBB00”). That was fine in 1998, but these days we’re pasting those color values into stylesheets, not font tags (you ARE, right? RIGHT?), so you have to edit the color after you paste it. There are a number of little tossed-together color pickers on the web, but most of them have some annoyance or fatal flaw that makes them more trouble than they’re worth.

Today I stumbled across Switch, which is a great little color picker tool. It’s small, doesn’t seem to crash, and it includes a little zoom window to help you hit the exact pixel you’re looking for. It’s even skinnable, but why anyone would spend their time re-skinning a color picker utility is beyond me.

Anyone have any favorite tools for sampling colors, or other web dev related tasks?

by Joe   July 26, 2004 3:06 PM   |

Comments

by Deane,   July 26, 2004 3:28 PM  

Pixie is great. 60KB.

http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.html

by Philipp Lenssen,   July 26, 2004 3:33 PM  

I wrote my own color picker* some years ago. It's a tiny free VB app to convert between different values or choose your own color. It is not intended to load existing images. For that I use PSP4, which also includes all the color-picking I might need.

*WebCol Preview, explanation: http://www.outer-court.com/basic/vbasic.htm

Download: http://www.outer-court.com/basic/file/colset.zip

by Matt,   July 26, 2004 4:01 PM  

Color cop is by far the best, lightweight color picking tool I've found -- and it always stays on top of your windows.

http://www.datastic.com/tools/colorcop/

by Jonathan Hollin,   July 26, 2004 4:09 PM  

Iconico's "ColorPic" is my colour-picker of choice.

http://www.iconico.com/colorpic/index.aspx

by Owen,   July 26, 2004 4:46 PM  

IrfanView will tell you the HTML value of a color if you click a spot and hold it down. Look at the title bar.

by Scott,   July 26, 2004 7:17 PM  

I like MatchHead.

http://www.alhena-design.com/matchhead/

by Joe,   July 27, 2004 8:52 AM  

Owen: I had forgotten that IrFan would do that. If only you could copy the value! They should make it that a ctrl-c while the title bar is displaying the HTML color would copy the color value as text to the clipboard.

by ,   July 27, 2004 3:46 PM  

I tried a bunch. HTMLcolor is the one I stuck with. It will put the color in the format of your choice or the xy coordinates in the clipboard. It has a maginfier area. It also has a color bank to save and reuse colors you find. No install, tiny exe file.

hjem.get2net.dk/fec/software/htmlcol/index.html

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