Color Picker

Online Color Picker: Extract Exact Colors From Any Image

This color picker is a completely free online tool that lets you extract precise color values from any point of an image without installing professional design software. It offers five sources: an upload, a pasted screenshot, an image URL, your screen, and a color value. Uploads, pasted screenshots, screen picking and color lookup all run inside your browser, so the image never leaves your device. Only the Image URL channel is fetched once by our server, which streams the bytes straight back to your browser and stores neither the image nor the URL.

Whether you're a designer pulling a brand color from a logo, a developer trying to reproduce a website's palette, or just a curious user wondering "what exactly is that nice blue in this photo?", this tool gives you an accurate answer in seconds.

How Is a Color Actually "Picked"?

An image is, at its core, a grid of pixels, and each pixel has one unique color value. After you load the image locally, the tool reads the RGB data of the pixel under your cursor and converts it into three common color notations: HEX (hexadecimal, used in web CSS and design mockups), RGB (three red/green/blue channels), and HSL (hue, saturation, lightness).

For uploads, pasted screenshots and screen capture, all the math runs in browser memory with no network request, so even large high-resolution images respond instantly, and the sampled color is not distorted by upload compression. The screen picker uses a single frozen frame: pick a screen or window, the tool captures one frame, sharing stops immediately, and you then sample that still image pixel by pixel.

How to Use the Five Channels

1. Upload: drag and drop an image into the dashed area, or click "Select File" to choose from your computer (JPG / PNG / WebP / BMP / GIF, up to 50MB).
2. Paste: take a screenshot (Win+Shift+S on Windows, ⌘+Shift+4 on macOS), come back and press Ctrl/⌘ + V — no need to save a file first.
3. Image URL: paste a direct https image link, click "Load Image", and the server fetches it once so you can sample it locally.
4. Screen Picker: click "Start Screen Picking", choose a screen, window or tab, and click the frozen frame (desktop Chrome / Edge).
5. Color Lookup: open the system color picker, or type a value such as #FF6B35, rgb(255,107,53) or hsl(12,100%,61%) to convert it instantly.

Once an image is loaded, move your mouse over it to preview the color and coordinates under the cursor; move to the target spot and click to lock that pixel in. In the result area below, click any of the HEX / RGB / HSL values to copy it to your clipboard instantly. Switching channels never clears the loaded image — only "Choose Another" resets everything.

Common Pitfalls When Sampling Colors

① JPEG compression artifacts. JPEG is lossy, so edges and gradients often show slight color noise, and the sampled value may differ a bit from your first impression. For strict color work, prefer PNG or WebP.
② Don't ignore transparency. If the image has an alpha channel (like a PNG icon), you may sample a semi-transparent color that looks different on a solid background. For those pixels the tool emits 8-digit HEX (e.g. #FF6B3580) plus rgba()/hsla() and flags it; a fully transparent pixel is reported as such rather than shown as black.
③ Position matters. Sampling the center of a uniform block vs. its shadowed or highlighted edge can yield values several steps apart. To get a standard color, aim for the even middle of the block.

Understanding HEX, RGB, and HSL

HEX starts with a hash (e.g. #FF6B35) and is the most common format in web development — each pair of digits represents red, green, or blue intensity. RGB uses three 0–255 numbers (e.g. rgb(255,107,53)) and suits programmatic work. HSL is more intuitive: it splits color into hue (which color), saturation (how vivid), and lightness (how bright), making it easier for designers to tune a palette.

With these three values in hand, you can drop them directly into CSS, Sketch, Figma, or Photoshop without manually matching colors.

How to Interpret and Use the Result

The extracted values can be used directly for web styling, brand visual systems, data-visualization palettes, or as a starting point for further tuning. If you want to verify that a foreground color stays readable on a given background, pair this with our Color Contrast Checker to confirm it meets WCAG accessibility standards — so your palette is both attractive and usable.