Image Color Picker — Free Online Tool

The Image Color Picker reads the exact colour of any pixel in an uploaded image and gives you the value in HEX, RGB, and HSL.

The reason to sample rather than eyeball is that screens and eyes are both unreliable at this. Perceived colour shifts significantly depending on what surrounds it — the same grey looks warmer against blue and cooler against orange — so matching a colour by sight consistently produces something slightly off. A pixel value does not have that problem.

The three formats are useful in different places. HEX is the CSS default and what most design tools hand you. RGB is the same information in a form you can manipulate arithmetically and is what you need when adding an alpha channel. HSL is the one worth understanding properly, because it separates hue from saturation and lightness — which means you can build a coherent palette by holding the hue fixed and varying lightness, something that is awkward to do in HEX and obvious in HSL.

The everyday uses: pulling brand colours out of a logo when nobody can find the brand guidelines, matching a website's accent colour to a photograph, extracting a palette from a reference image, and identifying the exact shade in a screenshot so a developer can reproduce it.

Everything is read from a canvas in your browser; the image is never uploaded.

Our Image Color Picker is completely free to use with no signup required. For this tool, processing runs in your browser — your files and data stay on your device and are not uploaded to our servers.

Whether you are a developer, designer, student, or business owner, this tool is designed to save you time and make your workflow more efficient. Bookmark this page to access it whenever you need it — it will always be free.