21 Useful color picker tools for graphics designers
21 Useful color picker tools
Use of color is indispensable for art in general. If you are a graphic designer, you know that in order to create something you have to think in colors.
In that sense, a color picker tool can make life much easier. There are tons of color picker out there. But not all have the essential capability to full fill the need.
So here we are, presenting you a list of 21 most useful color picker tools for your creative endeavors.
Adobe Color CC was previously known as the Adobe Kuler. This software was not as fully-fledged as it is today. Over time adobe has polished it to perfection. Now you can use it to generate theme or share your creative resources.
This tool can let you try out different color scheme. Each of which has five color palette and after creating one, you can later export that straight into Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
Like Adobe Colour CC Mudcube also provides color schemes. It provides HEX code for each color to build your own color scheme. Designers can also choose different color scheme from its pre-built color scheme drop-down menu. When you choose one shade of color, it gives you a scheme based on that shade.
So if you are unsure of your scheme, you can always use their built-in theme.
This color picker tool gives you the ability to upload your own image and it will create a color palette based on what is in that image. Apart from that, it has features to toggle alternative shades, palette adjustment, drop down menu for color blindness and more.
This tool will automatically create a scheme for you and every time you press the spacebar it will create new one for you. You can also control individual shade by adjusting the brightness, saturation, and hue. You can change the shade by choosing what alternate shade satisfy your need.
And you can export the scheme as PDF, PNG, SVG, SCSS or COPIC. Moreover, there is a Coolors app for Android or iOs smartphones, and it also has an Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator plugin.
Paletton is a very capable tool for choosing color palette. It has been used by many professional as well as beginner designers. What it does is basically, it lets you choose a base color and based on that color it creates different shades in boxes.
It also has the option where you can fine tune the palette by choosing adjacent colors, triad, tetrad, and freestyle color. It also creates different presets for you so that you can pick easily.
Other than this, it has preview window where you can see the change in real-time. An example option to see how it will look like if used in a website. You can also be able to share your scheme for generating a link for it.
This is a very simple website with only one option in its sleeve. You can only upload the URL of an image and this tool will separate the color of the image. The separated color then will be shown in two different columns. One column is called ‘Dull’ and another one is called ‘Vibrant’.
This is useful for coming up with a website color scheme that matches a stock photo a client wants to work with.
This online tool will let you pick a color with its ‘pick a color’ option or you can randomly choose a color with its ‘random color picker’. After picking a color it will give you 4 different analysis of the color that you have chosen.
It will give you shades/tints analysis, where you will see a range of shades of the color with HEX codes.
It will give you tone analysis, where you will see a gradient of tones with HEX codes.
It will give you a set of mixed color based on some mixing algorithm with HEX codes.
It will give you a set of similar color to choose from with HEX codes.
This website will give you two options in which you can upload an image. You can either upload your own image or you can place an URL.
After pressing the ‘Get Platte’ button you will be presented with 4 different palettes.
Light color palette has 7 light color sheds that are available in the given image.
Medium color palette has 7 medium color sheds that are available in the given image.
Dark color palette has 7 dark color sheds that are available in the given image.
Complete color palette has all the above sheds in one place.
Upon choosing a color you will see a preview (current color, selected color) of that color and its HEX code. You will also be given a history of last 8 colors and the option to erase them.
This tool will allow you to upload up to 20 images from your device. You can also drag files to the drop area to start the upload process. You can switch between uploaded images by clicking the thumbnails in the queue. To change the number of extracted colors please use the slider. If you need to process not the whole image but only a certain fragment, use the sample selection dialog activated by CHANGE THE SAMPLE button.
This service utilizes k-means algorithm to cluster the pixels in groups based on their color and then to find the dominant colors located in the center of the groups. So far it is the only online tool that allows to select an area of interest in addition to processing a whole image. And the only color extraction service allowing multiple uploads. Moreover, the interface is compatible with mobile devices. Also under the hood, the most recent extensions of k-means algorithm, to overcome its limitations and drastically improve both performance and precision.
First of all, this Material Palette tool is mainly ideal for mobile application development and has 3 distinct features under its hood. First, you will find an option called palette, beside that there is another option called icons, and last option named colors.
Under the palette section, you will find almost 20 individual colors. Upon choosing any two of those colors you will be presented with a palate preview window with a preview of the application interface and with 8 different shades for different use case.
You can download the palette or tweet it. Available downloadable format includes CSS, SASS, LESS, SVG, XML, PNG, and POLYMER.
Under the icon section, you will find an array of icons. You can search your icons from the search bar.
Under the color option, you will see 19 different colors and upon clicking you will be given a different shade of that colors.
Colorschemer is an online tool for creating color schemes. You can set an HEX code or RGB code in the toolbar and the tool will generate a color scheme based on the selected color.
You can also select color from an existing color palette and the palette will give you 16 different shade to choose from.
You can then lighten or darken the scheme to match your desired outcome.
This online tool lets you upload photo from your pc, Flickr, Instagram, Facebook, Dropbox. Then it will generate color scheme based on your photo.
This tool will analyze the photograph for different color combination and then will give you a color scheme as well as provide a CSS code for the color scheme. You can download swatches to use in Adobe software.
This tool is very simple yet very powerful. When you land on the website, you will be presented with a full page of color. But it will add color as you move your cursor on the screen. You can also scroll the mouse to control the saturation.
Color by Hail Pixel keeps on generating color swatches until you are done with the desired color palette. Simply click to save a color.
This tool is by far the most fun to play with. TinEye uses its MulticolorEngine to extract the colors from 20 million Creative Commons images on Flickr to make the images searchable by color.
This is not your typical color picker tool, it’s much more than that. It is a color search engine. You can search color in images or images by color.
There are three steps to the process. First, you select the color, you can select up to 5 colors. Then step two is for calibration and adjustment of color composition. Step three is for refining your search result even further using tags.
It’s probably the fastest way to get free images in the perfect colour combination, and it’s also just a fascinating and intuitively designed tool that’s a pleasure to use.
ColorExplorer is very feature rich and most advanced color palette generator. You can create your own palette by utilizing different features of the tool.
You can add colors from classic color picker tool or you can choose color from its vast color libraries. ColorExplorer has eight different color matching algorithm and you can choose and adjust different aspects of the tool to make the suitable palette for your need.
You can also analyze the colors to get the best possible match for each other. There is also a contrast analysis option for assessing contrast.
Lastly, you can save your palette, replace it or create a new one or you can export them in multiple format like Aadobe Swatch Exchange (.ASE), Aodobe Photoshop (.ACO), PNG Or Text File.
At Designspiration, you can select up to five hues from a useful full-page palette, which gives you the chance to really see what colors you’re looking at. This is very similar to Pinterest and they don’t even try to hide it.
First, you select your colors then search, the site will then generate a display of all the images in its database with that colour combination. The hex numbers are prominently displayed, and you can click on them individually. Images can be saved to your collections on the site.
Color on the web has color wizard tool which generates Color Schemes and Color Variation. Under Color Schemes you will get six different schemes. There will be an Analogous section, Complementary Color section, Split Complementary section, Monocromatic section, Triadic section, and a Tetradic section which represent a range of color based on the selected color.
And under the color variation section, you will get three different schemes like Hue variation, Saturation variation, Tint and shade variation.
Then you can choose the exact color you want to blend with your design or something like that.
In ColourCode, you can generate color schemes by clicking and adding the color on the screen browser. Every generated color has few options for saving the color as Less, SCSS, PNG, etc.
It has a full page interface and you can have different color as you move your mouse across the screen. Not only that you can later adjust the color from the setting and you will have different color code option like HEX code, RGB, HSL, HSV, CMY, CMYK.
You can generate color palettes in categories like monochrome, monochrome light, analog, triad, quad, complement, etc. The generated color scheme can be downloaded in various languages or types.
Color Blender is a perfect tool to generate color schemes with shade transitions in two colors. You can choose color one and color two in this tool and let them blend. You can also choose how many shade midpoints you want to have between the chosen colors.
Instructions are pretty simple too. Pick a color value format, input two valid CSS color values in the format you chose, and pick the number of midpoints you’d like to see. The palette will show the colors you input as well as the requested number of midpoint colors, and the values of those colors.
Now, if you’d like to have the Color Blender for offline use, just view source and save to your hard drive.
With a list of useful feature set Huesnap is one of the most sophisticated color picker tool out there. You can explore color palettes from a myriad of user made color palette which is available for you to use.
Each color palette has at most 6 individual color and upon clicking any palette you will be presented with color code including HEX, RGB, CMYK, HSV, HSL. Not only that, but you will also get a set of six additional color palette. Shades, Analogous, Complementary, Compound, Monochromatic, Triad.
You can also make your own color palette. There are two ways to do that. You can upload an image and the tool will automatically create a color palette based on the color used in the image.
Khroma is an AI color tool that aims to help you easily browse and compare original color combinations. With it, users train an AI algorithm to act as an extension of their brain. Users start by picking 50 colors they like, and these colors are used to train a neural network that can recognize hundreds of thousands of other similar colors.
But this tool is in beta and getting many things fixed. New features are being added every now and then. If things go right, this can be a breakthrough. You will be able to create some amazing color palettes with AI.
So there you have it. These are our top 20 list of most useful color picker tools for graphic designer. Every one of these tools has its own features and benefits. Some are good for picking colors some are good for creating amazing color palettes. Nonetheless, try out for yourself and pick the best one to suit your need.
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