How to Use an Online Color Picker

An online color picker lets you choose a color and read it back in every common format at once. Open the color picker, pick a color, and you get HEX, RGB, HSL, HSV and CMYK side by side, each ready to copy.

Ways to choose a color

There are three quick ways to land on the color you want:

1. Use the native picker swatch to drag around the spectrum.
2. Type or paste a value, such as a hex code or an rgb() string.
3. Sample a pixel from your screen with the eyedropper.

Whichever way you choose, the readouts update live, along with the nearest human color name.

Sampling a color from your screen

The eyedropper is the fastest way to match a color you can see but do not have a code for. Click the sample button, and your cursor turns into a magnifier. Click any pixel, including pixels inside other windows or images, and that exact color drops into the picker.

This works in recent versions of Chrome and Edge. In other browsers the button is hidden, but the rest of the picker still works as normal.

Reading the formats

Each format answers a different need:

• HEX and RGB are what you paste into CSS or design tools.
• HSL makes it easy to nudge a color lighter or darker without changing its hue.
• HSV maps closely to the controls in many design apps.
• CMYK is the starting point when a color is heading to print.

Click any value to copy it. Nothing you pick is uploaded or stored, since the whole picker runs in your browser. When you want the nearest name for a color, the color name finder covers that, and the HEX to RGB converter handles plain conversions.