Image Color Picker
Upload a photo and click anywhere on it to sample its color, like an eyedropper, with five sample sizes compared side by side. Runs entirely in your browser, your image is never uploaded anywhere.
This Session
Lost when you refresh or leave this page.
Where the Eyedropper Comes From
Sampling a color straight off the screen instead of mixing it from scratch is an old idea in digital graphics, one this tool just moves fully into the browser.
MacPaint's Eyedropper
Bill Atkinson's MacPaint ships a "pick up color" tool, letting artists sample a color already on screen instead of mixing it by hand, the direct ancestor of every eyedropper since.
Photoshop's Sample Size
Adobe Photoshop 1.0 adds an eyedropper with adjustable Point, 3×3, and 5×5 sampling, averaging out noisy pixels instead of grabbing just one, the same convention this tool's five previews borrow.
The Hex Code
Early HTML and CSS standardize the #RRGGBB hex format, turning "the color I picked" into a value that travels cleanly between design tools, code, and browsers.
Right in the Browser
The Canvas API lets an eyedropper run entirely client-side on a web page, no software install and nothing uploaded, like the tool above.
Common Questions
Does my image get uploaded anywhere?
No. The image is decoded and read entirely in your browser using the Canvas API. It's never sent to a server, not even to generate the colors you see.
What do the five previews mean?
Point reads the exact pixel under your cursor. The 3×3, 5×5, 11×11, and 31×31 previews average a small square of pixels around that point instead (the same sample sizes Photoshop's eyedropper offers), which smooths out noise or JPEG compression artifacts. All five update live while the small icon above the samples shows an open lock; clicking the image locks them (the icon switches to a closed lock) so you can move the cursor away without losing the sample, and clicking again releases it to keep sampling.
What's the magnifying glass for?
It shows a zoomed-in, gridded view of the pixels right under your cursor, with a colored outline for each of the five sample sizes, so you can see exactly which pixels each preview is reading even in a busy or detailed image.
Can I use a picked color in the Color Wheel tool?
Yes. Each of the five previews has a palette icon that opens the Color Wheel tool with that exact color already loaded, ready to build a complementary, analogous, triadic, or other palette from it. Clicking anywhere else on a preview instead copies its hex to your clipboard.
What image formats and sizes are supported?
Anything your browser can decode natively, typically JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP. There's no hard file size limit, but very large images are scaled down internally for performance.