Designers call it eyedropping: you see the exact blue of a jumper in a photo, the precise green of a logo on a van, the warm grey of a wall in a listing picture — and you need that colour as a number you can use. Click any pixel of your image here and this page reads it back as HEX, RGB and HSL at once. Your image is decoded by your own browser and never leaves your device.
One pixel, three notations
The click is resolved against the image's natural coordinates — the picture's real pixels, not the shrunken preview — so the colour you get is the colour that is actually stored at that point, not an average invented by resizing. The value is then written three ways, because different tools ask in different tongues. HEX (#2563eb) is the language of CSS and web design. RGB (37, 99, 235) is how screens physically mix the colour and how most image editors report it. HSL — hue around the colour wheel, saturation, lightness — is the human one: it answers “the same blue but lighter” by changing a single number, which is why designers reach for it when building a scheme around a picked colour. All three are computed from the same pixel, so they always agree.
The palette: an image's five favourite colours
Press the palette button and the page surveys the whole picture: pixels are grouped into colour buckets (each channel rounded to the nearest 32 levels), transparent pixels are ignored, and the five biggest buckets are reported — not as bucket centres, but as the average of the real pixels in each, most frequent first. The result is the image's honest colour story: the sky, the grass, the skin tones, the brand colour repeated across a product shot. It is the fastest way to lift a working palette from a photo you love, or to check that a set of product images actually share the background colour they were supposed to.
What a picked colour cannot tell you
A photograph's pixels are the colour of the light at the scene as the camera recorded it, not a paint code or a fabric dye. The same jumper reads navy in shade and royal blue in sun; JPEG compression blends neighbouring pixels, so a click on a sharp edge can land on a blend that exists in no thread. Pick from the middle of a flat area, average a few neighbouring clicks if the surface is textured, and treat the number as an excellent starting point for matching — then confirm against a physical swatch before ordering ten litres of it.
Worked example
Use the sample photo and click the sun in the top right: you will get a warm yellow close to #f7c948 in HEX, with its RGB and HSL beside it. Then press Extract 5-colour palette: the sky blue, the greens of the hill and the mountain grey lead the list, most frequent first — the whole scene summarised as five swatches.
How to use this tool
- Drop your image onto the box (or use the sample photo).
- Click the exact pixel whose colour you want, on the picture itself.
- Read the colour three ways — HEX for the web, RGB for editors, HSL for adjusting by eye.
- Note the status line: it reports the pixel's coordinates in the full-size image.
- Press Extract 5-colour palette to see the image's dominant colours as swatches with their HEX values.
From a picked colour to a working scheme
One colour is a fact; a scheme is a decision. The HSL readout is your lever: keep the hue and drop the lightness by 20–30 points for a darker companion that always harmonises, raise lightness toward 90% for a background tint of the same family, or turn the hue 180 degrees for the complementary contrast colour. The palette button gives you the colours the image itself already chose — starting a design from those five guarantees the scheme and the photograph agree, because the scheme literally came out of the photograph.