Thread: What Colour is That? Color Detector

If your building a website or just painting your house this maybe of use to you, especially if your color blind and your customer wants a pale green background or wall and really hates your choice of pale blue which you believe is pale green.

Now we could call this box yellow, or maybe light yellow, not a very accurate description though is it, especially if you was trying to explain it over the phone, so what you need is a color checker, these will give you both an RGB and a Hex code, ie the hex code for this yellow is flfe34, or the RGB which is Red 252, Green 254, Blue 52, all quite easy really innit.



Here is the color detectors window, the "Location" is where your mousey thing is on the monitor, the name will more often not work than work as they haven't come up with 16 odd million names for colors yet, 16,777,216 to be exact.

The easiest one to work with is the Hex Code as it is just 6 digits and or letters.



Here is the color choice window for a banner and button maker, you see that blurry mess of colors on the right, now quite obviously there isn't 16 million colors there, this is because it is mainly used to make gif files so you only get the choice of 256 colors and I snagged it as a gif anyway, you can see all the dithering where it is trying to blend in the colors in nice neat steps.



You can download this color detector here Web site: Cosmin | Color Detector or just google and you will find plenty of other free ones.

From the Cosmin website.

Color Detector Help
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Simply position the "Color Detector" window anywhere on the screen, so that you won't overlap the portion of the screen that you are interested in, for detecting a color.

Then point the mouse cursor, anywhere on the screen, and check the various fields on the "Color Detector" window.
They are updated as you move the mouse cursor on the screen.

It will show you the RGB (red, green, and blue) components, HTML hex code, the color name, of the color of the pixel currently pointed at by the mouse.

When you have found a desired color you can press one of the three keyboard shortcuts: F5, F6, or F7.

- F5 toggles on or off the "freeze mode". In freeze mode the fields on the Color Detector window are no longer updated continuously. This helps if you want to be able to keep static a particular color.

- F6 copies the hex color value to the clipboard, for example ffff00 for yellow, or 008000 for green.
This feature is useful for web site development in finding out color codes to place into your HTML and CSS files.

- F7 copies the RGB color values to the clipboard, for example RGB (0, 0, 255) for blue, or RGB (128, 0, 128) for purple. This feature is very useful for Windows programming as the text copied to the clipboard is the Windows API macro for specifying color values.

For the above keyboard shortcuts to work, make sure that Color Detector is the active window before you press the keys. If another application or window is the active one at that moment, these keyboard shortcuts will not work, and instead it might activate features in the other active window, that use the same function keys as Color Detector.