Image Color Picker
Click any pixel in a photo to get its HEX, RGB and HSL, with a zoom loupe and history. 100% free, no signup. Everything runs in your browser.
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Upload any image and this free color picker turns your cursor into an eyedropper with a magnifier loupe, so you can see exactly which pixel you are about to sample. Click, and the color is captured as HEX, RGB and HSL, each with its own copy button. Every pick lands in a history strip along the bottom, so you can pull five or six colors from a photo and keep them all in view while you work. A zoom control gets you down to individual pixels when precision matters.
Like every image tool on this site, the photo is processed entirely in your browser and never uploaded anywhere. I built this one for a painfully specific reason: I kept screenshotting logos and squinting at blurry pixels trying to match a brand color by eye. The loupe fixes that permanently. When you need the same color in other formats or want to tweak it, my color converter takes any value you pick here and translates it.
How to use
- Upload an image by clicking the upload area or dragging a file in.
- Move your cursor over the image and watch the magnifier loupe show the pixels under it.
- Use the zoom control when you need pixel-exact accuracy on fine details.
- Click to capture the color under the crosshair.
- Copy the HEX, RGB or HSL value with its copy button.
- Keep clicking to add more colors, and revisit any of them in the history strip.
Why use our image color picker?
The loupe is what separates this from squinting at a screenshot. Colors that look uniform at normal size are usually a mosaic up close: JPG compression speckles flat areas, anti-aliasing blends edge pixels with the background, and a logo's crisp blue is surrounded by a halo of in-between shades. The magnifier shows you that mosaic so you sample the true color from the middle of a region rather than a contaminated edge pixel. This is the difference between matching a brand color exactly and being annoyingly, visibly close.
Three formats with copy buttons covers the way people actually work. HEX goes straight into CSS, design tools and brand documents. RGB is what image editors and many frameworks expect. HSL is the one you want when you plan to adjust a color, since nudging lightness or saturation in HSL keeps the hue intact. All three notations describe the same color and are formally defined in the CSS color value specification on MDN if you want the deeper theory.
The history strip solves the problem of picking in sequence. Extracting a scheme from a photo means comparing candidates: is the sky blue or the shadow blue better for the header? With every pick preserved side by side, you choose by looking rather than by memory. I have pulled entire website palettes from a single landscape photo this way.
Local processing matters for the same reason it does across all my image tools. Mockups under NDA, unreleased product shots, screenshots of internal dashboards: these should not travel to a stranger's server just to read a pixel value. Here the image goes onto a canvas in your browser's memory and nowhere else.
And it works where native eyedroppers fail. Many design programs can only sample colors inside their own window, and some browsers still lack a built-in eyedropper. This works on any image file you can open, on any modern browser, with no install and no signup.
Who is this tool for?
Designers and developers matching brand colors is the classic case. A client sends a logo with no style guide, you need the exact blue for buttons and links, and guessing produces something subtly wrong next to the real logo. Pick it here, copy the HEX, and it is settled. If the client wants a full scheme rather than one color, my color palette extractor pulls the dominant colors from the whole image automatically.
Decorators and DIYers photograph a cushion, a rug or a wall they love and pick the color to take to the paint counter. Most major paint brands in the US, UK and Australia can match from a HEX code or an RGB value these days, so a photo of your sofa becomes a swatch you can actually order against.
Artists use the zoom and loupe to study reference photos: what color is that shadow really? Skin, foliage and skies are famously full of hues your brain refuses to see until a picker shows you the numbers. Sampling a dozen points from a reference and lining them up in the history strip is a small color theory lesson every time.
Anyone rebuilding a favicon, social graphic or presentation theme from an existing screenshot picks the two or three key colors here first. I did exactly this when refreshing my own site icons, sampling the accent color from a screenshot before generating the assets with my favicon generator.
Frequently asked questions
No. The image is drawn onto a canvas inside your browser and every pixel read happens locally on your device. Nothing is transmitted, stored or logged, which makes the tool safe for confidential mockups, unreleased designs and private photos.
Use the zoom control together with the loupe. Zoom in until individual pixels are clearly visible squares, position the crosshair on the one you want, and click. For small details like thin text or a one-pixel border, sampling at high zoom is the only reliable way to avoid grabbing a blended neighbor.
Usually because of anti-aliasing or JPG compression. Pixels at the edge of a shape are blended with the background, and compressed images scatter near-miss colors through flat areas. Sample from the middle of a solid region at zoom and you will get the true value.
They are three notations for the same color. HEX is a compact code like #1a73e8 used across the web, RGB lists red, green and blue components, and HSL describes hue, saturation and lightness, which is the most intuitive for adjusting a color. My color converter switches any value between these formats instantly.
Yes, screenshots are probably the most common input. Capture anything on your screen, upload the file here, and sample it. PNG screenshots are ideal because they are lossless, so the pixel values are exactly what was on screen with no compression drift.
Enough for any realistic session; the strip keeps your recent picks visible side by side so you can compare and re-copy them. The history lives only in your browser tab and disappears when you close it, consistent with the tool storing nothing.
Yes. On touch screens the loupe matters even more, since your finger covers the very pixels you are choosing. The magnified preview shows what is under your fingertip, and the zoom control makes precise picks perfectly doable on a phone.