Pixel Picker

Photographs and compressed images are noisy: what reads as one flat colour is usually many slightly different pixels, so two samples a few pixels apart can differ. JPEG compression is particularly aggressive around sharp edges, where it invents colours that were never in the original.

Sample from the middle of a flat area rather than near an edge, and take a couple of readings to confirm. For a representative set of colours across a whole image, a palette extractor is the better tool.

Drop in a screenshot, logo, photo or design mockup, move over the area you want and a zoom loupe magnifies the pixels under your cursor, so you land on exactly the right one instead of its neighbour. Click to sample it and the hex code is ready to copy. Every click is kept as a swatch, so you can collect a set of colours from one image and copy each as you need it.

As a color picker from image files, it is the fastest way to match a colour you cannot look up. Pull a brand colour from a client's logo when there is no style guide, grab the exact shade from a screenshot of a website or app, or record the colours in a reference photo before building a palette around them.

Where you click matters. Sample from the middle of a flat area, not an edge, because anti-aliasing blends edge pixels with the background. Prefer PNG screenshots over JPGs, since JPEG compression shifts colours slightly and adds speckles around sharp shapes.

Photographs need more care. A photo records the camera's interpretation of a colour, shaped by lighting, white balance and editing, so the hex code from a photo of a painted wall is not the paint's true colour. Sample a few nearby points and use them as a starting point. When you want every main colour in an image at once rather than exact single pixels, the Palette Extractor does that in one step.