How to Pick a Colour From the Screen on Mac
You saw a colour in a mockup and you want the code. Your Mac already has the tool for it.
You need the exact orange from a design file. Screenshotting it and opening Photoshop is overkill.
Digital Colour Meter
It’s already installed: Applications → Utilities → Digital Colour Meter.
- Launch it — the area around your cursor appears magnified.
- Move over the pixel you want.
- Press ⇧⌘C to copy the value.
The View menu switches the readout between RGB, hexadecimal and more. The default isn’t necessarily sRGB, so if the value is headed for the web, check View → Display Values → as sRGB.
⌘+ and ⌘- change the magnification. Turn it up for small icons where it’s easy to land a pixel off.
Floatie’s colour picker
Floatie picks colours off a floating shot. Assign colour picker to one of the shot’s corner buttons and a single click lifts the pixel’s colour to your clipboard; the shortcut is ⌃⌥C.
It suits the way you work with a mockup parked on screen: no bringing the original window forward, and you can pull several colours from the same shot in a row.
Top left · Ghost
Clicks pass straight through the shot
When the value looks wrong
Same colour, different numbers — almost always a colour profile.
- A P3 display reporting into an sRGB expectation won’t match. Set the meter’s display values to sRGB.
- Sampling from a screenshot follows that image’s profile. Picking straight off the screen stays closer to the source.
- Sampling over a translucent layer gives you the blend, not the element. Hide what’s on top of it first.
Checking one value shouldn’t need a new app. If you do it often, a corner button is the shortest path there is.
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