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DigitalColor Meter is handy for sampling on-screen colour
Installed with every Mac, DigitalColor Meter gives you accurate readings of on-screen colours: you can inspect individual pixels, and copy and paste RGB values. When used with Safari or Firefox and a great text editor, it’s a lightweight but powerful tool. Here’s an overview…
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- Find it in /Applications/Utilities/
- For using with HTML and CSS, Â set the colour type to “RGB as Hex Value, 8-bit”
- Command+Shift+c to copy the current colour as text – perfect for pasting straight into a .css file, alternatively, click and drag from the swatch area to copy the current colour as text (switch this on in preferences first)
- Command+Shift+h to hold the current colour
- Set the magnification factor to maximum and the aperture size to minimum for pixel-perfect sampling. Handy for ‘borrowing’ font colours from other sites!
- Reduce the magnification factor and increase the aperture size for getting an averaged colour – say, when you’re working with gradients or photos
- When DigitalColor Meter is the active app, you can use the arrow keys to move the aperture in one-pixel increments
- You can also save the current hovered area as a .tiff file, or copy it to the clipboard.Â
- Set the window to float and keep it in the bottom right of the screen, so it’s always there at a glance.Â
One last point: on Tiger at least, if you switch users to a user who has DigitalColor Meter running it will crash. But that’s an annoyance at worst…
well written post…thank you
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to remove the quotes and extra spaces inserted into the copied color values? I would love to use the rgb value and paste it directly into an Adobe app, but the copied string values are too long. ex: (“AA AA AA”).
What I would like is a simple (AAAAAA). No extra spaces or quotes. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Hmm, that’s interesting… On my mac, running Tiger, Cmd Shift C copies a value like “#B2693A” to the clipboard. A click + drag from the swatch area copies a value like #B2693A (in other words, no quotes) to the clipboard.
Given a value like “AA AA AA”, I’d do this: copy it to the clipboard, then run a shell script that filters it and pipes it back to the keyboard, then simply paste it where you want it. Here’s an example script:
#!/bin/sh
pbpaste | sed s/\”//g | sed s/\ //g | pbcopy
…you need to save that as a shell script and make it executable, and you need to invoke it somehow; I’d suggest a keystroke utility for that, Quicksilver or something like that.
And if the value was “#aaaaaa” like the ones I see, use a script that does this instead:
#!/bin/sh
pbpaste | sed s/\”//g | sed s/#//g | pbcopy
…hope that helps. I’m going to set this up on my mac too as typing in those hex values is annoying!