When doing a graphic work on the computer, whatever program you use, you have to choose the colors . Choosing the right colors is very important both to distinguish a good job from a bad one and to make the content of your graphics project readable to everyone. By graphic design we mean anything that has to do with the creation of figures and images on the computer, therefore also the creation of a Powerpoint presentation and the design of a website, the photo editing of an image or even in the banal choice of color writing character on a document, table or simply, for a background.
Very often, in the choice of colors, one tries to take inspiration from images or websites and if a color scheme is done well there is no copyright that prevents copying it.
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On a computer, however, the possible colors are many and are organized in different ways depending on the application you use.
On Windows and on many programs of various types, for example, you choose colors with a guided panel where with the arrow you choose the base color and the shade.
For example, just go to the desktop properties, choose the background and try to set a fixed color; first some standard colors appear, then, you can press on "other colors" to access the selection window of the whole range.
In this case the colors differ for the RGB code, that is the coordinates of the primary color table which are green, blue and red.
On websites, in html language, the colors are indicated with a hexadecimal code of the type # 6A6965 for whose origin and explanation I refer to a specific treatment.
The purpose of this page is to take note of some useful programs to extract these colors from whatever appears on the PC monitor, in order to pick up the exact same one and use it on your website, on a graphic presentation or on any drawing program.
1) The best free tool that captures colors from the screen and allows you to read the code in order to reuse it, is ColorPix .
It is a small portable program, without installation, which says the RGB and hexadecimal codes of the color on which the mouse arrow stops.
To extract the color from another site or an image in its most precise shade, use the mouse arrow with ColorPix open to read which code must be typed to reuse it.
With the magnifier option you can zoom in on a small portion of the screen to collect precise detail .
Each color is automatically translated into its RGB, HEX, HSB and CMYK code.
2) Color detector is a program similar to the previous one in which the color code is obtained, both hexadecimal and RGB, relative to the place where the mouse arrow is located on the screen. With F5 the color stops, with F6 the HEX code is copied with F7 the RGB code.
In this case there is no possibility of zooming on a portion of the screen or image so it is less precise.
3) ColorZilla is an extension for Chrome and Firefox that is used to choose the colors to use and the hexadecimal code of the selected point. ColorZilla has a tool for analyzing website colors, a palette of choice and a CSS gradient generator. For its functions and convenience it is perhaps the best tool for those who want to explore the colors of the sites.
4) Since the choice of colors must be consistent, it takes a certain eye not to make a "tacky", thus avoiding juxtaposing bright colors that would annoy and become tacky. We must consider that choosing the right colors is important for both legibility and aesthetics, and for marketing issues. Choosing the right colors leads to catalyze the public's attention on some important details.
For the color schemes it is therefore possible to use an online tool, Paletton, which shows, given a certain color, which others are compatible with it.
5) Color Palette Generator gives support and inspiration to those who create websites to generate color variations, with the relative code.
6) Colorzilla is an extension for Google Chrome, which is used to find the colors used on websites and try different combinations.
7) As for the contrast of colors, it is very important to make sure that the site or the presentation or drawing of an image has the colors well defined. In fact, it must be considered that the perception of colors is not the same for everyone and that, due to sight or color blindness problems, it can happen that a writing on a background becomes illegible. The best tool to use is the Contrast-A software that makes automatic and immediate verification of the contrast between two colors according to the international standards of the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) websites.
Contrast-A can be used online via browser.
8) CPick is another automatic color capture where you have to press the "Click and Drag" button, hold it down and drag the mouse cursor transformed into a grid suitable for accurately selecting a color from whatever appears on the desktop .
CPick shows, for each framed color, the RGB code, the hexadecimal one, the decimal one, and the HSV and CMYK ones.
Among the buttons at the top there are two very useful to those who are creating a website because it is possible to create a list of colors in order to store them and it is possible to generate the CSS or HTML code to give a color scheme to a web page.
