Color Picker

What color picker does

A color picker lets you choose any shade, by eye from a color wheel or exactly by typing a hex code, and then fills your entire display with it. It is useful when the twenty or so named colors are not the specific shade you need: matching a brand color, testing one region of a panel, or lighting a subject at a particular temperature. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is installed; the color is drawn by your browser.

How to use it

1. Choose a shade from the color wheel, or type a hex code such as #1F8A70 into the field.
2. Click the preview, or press F, to fill the whole display with that color.
3. Press Esc to come back. Use the wallpaper panel if you want the same color saved as a PNG.

About color picker

Hex, RGB and HSL, and when each one helps

A hex code such as #1F8A70 is three pairs of hexadecimal digits giving the red, green and blue channels, each from 00 to FF. It is the format brand guidelines and design tools hand you, so it is the one to paste when you need an exact match. RGB expresses the same three channels as 0 to 255 and is what most code expects. HSL is the useful one when you are adjusting by eye rather than matching: hue is the position on the color wheel, saturation is how far it is from grey, and lightness is how close to black or white. Nudging lightness in HSL keeps the same color and simply makes it darker, which is awkward to do by hand in hex.

Matching a color you can see but do not have a code for

If you have the shade on screen somewhere else, a screenshot plus any eyedropper tool will give you the hex, and it can be pasted straight in here. Two cautions. A photograph of a colored object is not a reliable source, because the shade in the image is the object under that light, not the object. And a color sampled from a JPEG can be a compression artefact rather than the intended value, so sample from a flat area rather than an edge.

What a full screen of one color is actually good for

A single flat color across the whole display is the standard field for judging a panel: faults that hide inside normal content stand out against it, and driving every pixel to the same value is what makes an inconsistent one obvious. It is also the cheapest soft light available. A large bright area close to a subject is a soft light source, which is why a monitor showing a flat warm shade works as fill light on a video call, and why photographers use a tablet as a small softbox.

Why the color on screen may not match the color you picked

Two displays showing the same hex code rarely look identical. Each panel has its own color profile, brightness and white point, and phones often apply extra processing such as True Tone or a warm night mode that shifts everything toward amber. The code is exact; the light your eye receives is not. If you are matching something physical, judge it under consistent room light with any adaptive brightness or color temperature setting turned off.