Sometimes it can be a little inconvenient to fire up Photoshop, or dig through the source code of a webpage, just to get a color value. That’s where Pipette comes in really handy.
Pipette is a nifty little eyedropper app capable of sampling color values of any pixel on your screen. Once you sample the color, just hit copy (cmd + c), and the hex value is copied to your clipboard. Pipette is a relatively light-weight app, so you can just leave it running in the background, that way it’s always available.
Best of all, Pipette is FREE, although donations are welcome.
UPDATE: It looks like Apple gives us this functionality right out of the box in the form of a little app called Digital Color Meter. It’s in your Utilities folder. I had no idea. Digital Color Meter has the added benefit of giving you a couple of options for the color code it uses, however, Pipette has a simpler key command for copying the color and it auto-hides itself when it’s not the active app. Both work well, it just depends on your workflow as to which one is better for you. Thanks to Paul (and iChris) for this tip.
via Cool OSX Apps
OSX comes with DigitalColor Meter which does the same thing
Ah! Paul beat me to it. Took the words out of my mouth. Pipette does have a more interesting name though.
Cool! I had no idea. Thanks guys.
The other problem is that apps like this work in the color space of your screen, not of the image. If you’re a professional graphic artist who cares about getting the color Just Right, you still need to use Photoshop (or Pixen) to do it, because Pipette’s/DCM’s results will be a little off.
here’s a great system applescript that brings up the normal Color Picker as a useful global application.
http://restiffbard.com/archives/2005/06/15/os-x-color-palette/
basically an applescript with one small line: “choose color”. that’s it! save as an application and presto!