Post Archive
› August 30, 2003
Color Pick in OS X
This post is for anyone (like me) who by all rights should have figured this out, but for whatever reason, never realized it. Mac OS X users: do you need to isolate a color for use in your web design? If the color is part of a graphic file that you have open in photoshop, the easiest way is to simply use the tools in photoshop to pick the color and copy/paste the hex or rgb value for use in your CSS. What about grabbing colors out of a PDF that you have open? You could re-open the PDF in photoshop, but a quicker way would be to use some sort of color picker.
For a while I wondered why there seemed to be slim pickings in the OS X color picking apps available, then recently I found this posting at macosxhints.com, or rather the first comment made to this post, which points us to the built-in DigitalColor Meter of OS X. Which is located in the //applications/utilities/ folder. The little app works very well for isolating a color from any window or application open on your screen. There are output options for the color, and the CMD+Shift+C key chord will copy the color for pasting into your CSS document. There are little things that could be better about the tool, for instance copy/pasting in "RGB As Hex Value, 8-bit" seems to think that you'll always want quotes around your hex number (old-school-style for use in HTML, not helpful for CSS). Also copy/pasting the "RGB As Actual Value, 8-bit" seems to add an inordinate number of spaces between each value. All-in-all, the tool is a time saver - often times I'd rather remove a couple quote characters than open up photoshop, the color picker app has a small footprint. Do you have an app you like to use for isolating colors (OS X or otherwise)? Let us know about it in a comment to this post.
Comments
1. August 30, 2003 10:55 PM
2. August 30, 2003 11:36 PM
Russ Weakley Posted…
Wow. Never knew that tool was there. Very handy. Saves having to re-open fireworks or Photoshop just to get a colour sample. Thanks Nate
3. August 30, 2003 11:58 PM
Nate Posted…
I thought DotColor looked familiar. Nice that it's compact, simple, and free - that's tough to beat. I'd definitely prefer something like that for OS X.
4. August 31, 2003 11:31 AM
Lou Quillio Posted…
Another such utility (for Windows) is SLUGS (a Simple Little Utility for Generating Schemes). While SLUGS is a small, standalone utility, it first came to my attention because it will run as a plugin to my usual editor, HTML-Kit.
http://www.opensourcepan.co.uk/programs/slugs/
http://www.chami.com/html-kit/
Pixel color-grabbing is really SLUGS' second purpose; its first is suggesting color combinations based on various offsets from an initially chosen color -- whether grabbed from the screen or not. Small, free, worth having.
5. August 31, 2003 02:55 PM
6. August 31, 2003 05:18 PM
michael Posted…
Lou, I love HTML-Kit. And I've used SLUGS before, both as the plugin and the standalone, and the only issue I have with it is once you've activated the screen picker, you can't switch windows. Other than that it works great. I might give Dotcolor a go, however.
7. September 1, 2003 09:56 PM
starvingartist Posted…
A popular PC color picker in the application skinning community is ColorPad. It's very convenient, powerful and you can customize the look with a bunch of skins, such as this one. It's a quick-and-dirty (but pretty-looking) tool that has saved me a lot of time.
Another popular PC color picker is Higher Tendencies' Switch. It's a much larger and more comprehensive color picker. And it has support for other color models than the usual RBG and Hex, such as OLE and HSL.
8. September 3, 2003 02:07 PM
Darrel Posted…
For PC, I've been using Pixie.
For Mac, I loathe Apple for not just porting the damn-near-perfect OS9 color picker.
9. September 10, 2004 08:56 PM
Candy Posted…
When I was using a PC, I used Pixie and it was the love of my life. So simple.
Now I have a Mac. I just got it and have to figure out what works where, it has been so long since I have used a Mac.
If anyone has suggestions about color pickers, something simple and similar to Nattyware's Pixie, please email me at candylynch@mac.com or message me on Yahoo: dirtyrottencandy.
If you haven't tried Pixie, you really ought to. The same goes for Macs! :)
10. April 5, 2005 12:39 AM
Robin Wood Posted…
The Mac OS X system color picker allows you to choose a color from anywhere on your screen; it's just not well documented.
All you have to do is click on the Magnifying Glass to the left of the large swatch at the top. That changes your cursor to a magfiying glass/crosshair, and lets you pick any color, anywhere on your screen. You don't need to open anything else, or dig out any kind of program.
I find that the OS X Color Picker is extremely useful, way better than OS 9, once you know how to use it. Of course, learning to use it is the trick, so I've put a tutorial on my site, if anyone is interested.
If you want to know the numerical value of a color, you can download a freeware plug-in from Lucky Software that'll automatically give it to you, from inside the system color picker. I mean, how easy can it get?
James Posted…
About 5 minutes before this post apeared in my aggregator, I went on a hunt for a PC color picker.
Dotcolor is a teeny-tiny one.Color Picker V2 seems more like your OSx Version