Are you a designer looking to decode a brand design?
Or, you just found the perfect color to use but don’t know its code.
Whether you be a graphic designer or not, we often come across situations where we want to save a specific color from the internet.
Chrome being the most reliable browser there can be, provides some dependable tools for such a situation. Chrome offers a lot of extensions that can help you know a color code with a single click.
However, if you don’t know what you are looking for, it is challenging to get it on the Chrome Web store. Therefore, we did all the digging for you to list out the best color picker Chrome extensions.
So, without any further ado, let’s get started.
Table of Contents
Best Color Picker Chrome Extensions
A good color picker should let you choose how you want to organize your selections. You should know a few more things about a color like its hex color code, RGB values, and more. Here is a list of best Chrome extensions to identify the exact color of your screen. Moreover, it also has some essential features that we will discuss further.
1. ColorZilla
If you want a quick and straightforward way to pick colors out of your screen, use ColorZilla.
ColorZilla is one of the most popular color picker available for Chrome. To start with, when you install the extension, the symbol appears in your extension tab. You can click the extension icon to enable the color picker quickly. Then, hover above any color you want to note and click to finalize it.
You would see which color you are about to select in a pop-up panel in real-time. The panel also shows you the RGB values and the Hex color code. You can also set the sample size from point sample to 25*25 pixels. Or, you can create a custom area to choose an average color.
Besides that, the tool saves your color history in a palette for you to recollect it later. Another feature I liked about this extension is the Webpage Color Analyzer. It shows you the CSS color theme of the currently opened website on your tab. You can replicate the design if you are a web developer.
In a nutshell, ColorZilla has all the functionalities you can expect from a color picker. You can also create a shortcut key combination to launch the extension quickly.
2. ColorPick Eyedropper
ColorPick Eyedropper is another similar color identifying extension with a slightly different working.
The tool creates an icon in the extension bar after the installation. You can activate the extension by clicking on this icon. After that, a pop-up window appears with color related information. Meanwhile, your cursor changes into a plus symbol to locate the pixels. A zoomed-in and pixelated view of the area under the cursor always follows your movement throughout the window.
Another advantage of using this tool is you can sample as many colors as you want in a single go. Yes, the tools don’t close after selecting one color. Instead, it shows the color value in a box. Then, you can click anywhere on the window to take another sample. You can hit escape or the close button on the pop-up to end the color picking mode.
The pop-up changes its color to the one you selected. There are three icons on the pop-up window, which are History, Options, and Close. The History and Options button takes you to another extension page consisting of all the essential information about your chosen color. Here, you can select and tinker with the sampled colors.
There isn’t any downside to this tool. However, some users might find the user interface a little unappealing. Other than that, ColorPick Eyedropper is easy to use and has some quirky features that can come in handy.
3. Eye Dropper
Another minimal color identifying extension for Chrome is Eye Dropper.
This tool is simple and straightforward to use. After installation, you have to click on the Eye Dropper icon to open the tool window. Here, select the “Pick color from web page” option to activate the picker. You can also use the keyboard shortcut “Alt+P” instead.
When the selector is activated, you can see a small window at the bottom of your screen. It shows the color you are hovering above before you click to select it. Afterward, you can look for the details by clicking the extension icon again. Here, you will also find all the previously selected colors in the history section. Tweak and play with them to achieve your preferred shade.
The tool has a straightforward working with no extra features. I think that is enough for a color picker tool. Still, if quirky features excite you, you can export all the color codes from a palette in a “.csv” file if you want.
4. Color by Fardos
Color by Fardos is a minimal color picker extension for Chrome. You have to create an account if you want to save the history of picked colors.
After installing the extension, the icon appears on the extension tab. Click on the icon when you want to sample a color and select the eyedropper option from the pop-up.
Your cursor will then turn into a plus symbol, and a zoomed version of the area you are hovering above would follow the cursor. You can take as many samples as you want in a single go. The extension would record and show all the information in a pop-up window.
Additionally, the tool provides CSS codes for some fascinating color gradients in the extension menu. You also get different color combinations like the tints, complementary, triadic, and more colors associated with the selected one.
The user interface of this extension makes it the best color picker extension for Chrome to use. Although it does not have many capabilities like other extensions, it does its job pretty well.
How to Use Chrome’s Hidden Color Picker
You heard it right, Chrome has some quality features for the audience, and some of them are buried deep. One of them is a hidden color picker that would give you the Hex code for any color you want to sample. Let’s see how to do that.
Step 1. Open developer tools
The developer tools are a bit of technical stuff for web developers to tinker and evaluate. It consists of the technical details of web page elements. You can follow any of the following methods to open the developer tools.
- Go to Menu-> More Tools-> Developer toolsin the Chrome tab.
- Press “Ctrl+Shift+C” or “CMD+Shift+C” in mac.
- Right-click and select “Inspect Element.”
Step 2. Find one color element
When you go into the developer tools, make sure you are in the elements panel. You will ding the Styles panel open in the short window.
Now, click on the main body code. It should always be the third line of code in the Elements panel. Then look for a color element in the Styles section. I like to go with the “background-color” since it is easy to view the color we choose in a bigger space. Or, you can go with any color element.
Step 3. Click on the color
Click on the square symbol with color in it to open the color panel. You can see an eyedropper tool there. Usually, the eyedropper is active by default. However, you can look if the eyedropper is in blue to confirm. If not, click on it to activate the tool.
Then, hover above any element you want to sample. The eyedropper cursor would show a zoomed-in view of the component. After selecting the color, you can note its Hex code, RGB value, and HSL value from the color panel.
Wrap-up
Knowing the exact value of a color can help designers and developers in many aspects. We discussed some useful extensions and a built-in method to discover an element’s color code from a web page in this article.
If you are still confused, I found ColorZilla to be the best color picker extension for Chrome. You can always try others if you want. Let us know if you know any other method to see a web element’s color code in the comments below.
