Image Color Picker

Upload the image and drag a finger or cursor across it. The tool samples the colour at that point and shows it in six formats at once: HEX and RGB for the web, HSL and HSV for editors, CMYK for print and Lab for colorimetric work. Tapping a row copies the value to the clipboard.

Because the camera does not know what the lighting was and guesses the white balance — often wrongly. Incandescent lamps push the frame towards yellow, LEDs towards green or blue. That is what the "Set white reference" mode is for: tap a white sheet in the frame and the tool computes the lighting shift and removes it across the whole image.

A single pixel in a photograph carries sensor noise, grain and JPEG compression artefacts. On a smooth surface the difference is small, but on fabric, plaster or wood neighbouring pixels diverge visibly. So the default is an average over 9×9 pixels at the original resolution; the "1 px" mode stays for cases where you want exactly one pixel — a screenshot of an interface, for instance.

Pixels of a downscaled copy are clustered with k-means in Lab space, where distance matches how different the colours look to the eye. That differs from grouping by RGB, where numerically close values can look like separate shades. Each swatch shows its share of the image, and the palette is deterministic — the same picture always yields the same set.

It is the standard measure of difference between two colours, built around human vision: one unit is the threshold of noticeability. Under 1 is indistinguishable, 1–2 barely visible side by side, 2–3.5 noticeable when adjacent, above 5 simply different colours. The number is shown for every RAL candidate, so you see not only which is closest but whether it is close enough at all.

You can narrow the choice, not finish it. The tool lists five nearest RAL Classic colours with the ΔE2000 distance — enough to walk into a shop with three candidates instead of a two-hundred-colour catalogue. The final check is a paper fan deck under the light the paint will actually live in: enamel has gloss and texture that a photo does not carry.

Because the area you pointed at turned out to be noticeably coloured or too dark. Treating a red wall as a white sheet would repaint the whole image and leave the result worse than no correction at all. Refusing is more honest than failing quietly: point at paper, a white socket, a skirting board.

Yes. Besides uploading a file you can paste an image straight from the clipboard with Ctrl+V, which is the fastest route for a screenshot. JPG, PNG, WEBP, HEIC, AVIF, GIF and BMP are supported.