Determine hexadecimal RGB color of anything on the screen

Posted on November 18, 2008 at 5:45 am

For serious color identification, it is important that we understand the RGB (red, green and blue) color signature. The idea of using RGB values to identify colors is taken from the color theory that colors are a combination of the three primary colors (red, green, and blue).

RGB is usually denoted using a hexadecimal triplet. A pure Blue for example is denoted as #0000FF where the first two 0’s designated red; the next two 0’s for green and the two F’s for blue. For web and interface designers, it is important to understand the colors used on their projects to make sure that the monitor display could handle the colors correctly.

The tool is a free downloadable from www.iconico.com. Get ColorPic from that website and then install it on your computer. Once you open ColorPic it will instantly pick the colors where your mouse pointer hovers even outside ColorPic’s window. The upper part of ColorPic will let you choose from several predefined palettes. The palette’s color chips will show and the current RGB value of the chosen chip will be show up so you can copy it:

By pressing Control-G you can point your mouse pointer to any part of your screen to magnify that part and pinpoint a pixel’s color:

Take advantage of the chips panel to save your chosen colors:

Web designers could use this to make sure that the colors they choose are web-safe (the colors will appear the same way on any colored monitor).

ColorPic’s automatic web-safe identification and partial screen magnification makes it a necessary tool for users who demand exact color identification. If you need to be precise with your colors, this is a must have.