How to pick a color from anywhere on screen in Windows

The built-in way: Paint

Windows can do this without installing anything. Take a screenshot (Win+Shift+S), paste it into Paint, and use the color picker tool on the pixel. Then open Edit colors to read its values. It's slow, but it's built in.

When you need more than the code: Solace Color

Picking the color is often step one. Next someone wants it in CMYK, or wants to know whether white text on it is readable, or needs a palette or a CSS gradient to match. Solace Color is our Windows app that keeps all of that in one window. Here's what we confirmed in our own tests.

1. Pick the pixel

Open the Selector and click Select to start the eyedropper. In our tests it read the pixel under the cursor exactly. For example, a white area gave 255;255;255 / #ffffff, matching our own screen sample. The app also lists keyboard shortcuts, Shift+S to pick and Shift+C to copy. Those are on by default, though we didn't press them in our tests. A pin button keeps the window always on top while you work.

2. Convert it to any format

Type or pick one color and the converter shows it as HEX, RGB, HSV, HSL, CMYK, DEC, XYZ, YIQ and YUV at once. We checked #336699: RGB 51;102;153, HSV 210,67,60, HSL 210,50,40, CMYK 67,33,0,40, and the values were correct. Invalid input like zz12 gets a clear "The color is invalid." One honest note: CMYK uses whole percentages, so a HEX → CMYK → HEX round trip can drift by one step (#336699 came back as #326799).

3. Check the text contrast

The Text tool shows a preview with the contrast ratio. Black on white gives the expected 21. The ratios on our random pairs matched the WCAG formula exactly. The contrast grid shows the tints and shades of your color that pass AA (4.5:1) or AAA (7:1).

4. Build palettes and gradients

• Palettes: shades, brightness, hues, analogous, monochromatic, complementary, split-complementary and triadic. The harmony hues came out as expected for our test color.
• Gradients: the CSS updates live, for example background: linear-gradient(45deg, …). There's also Tailwind and XAML output.
• Image extractor: pulls the main colors out of a picture with their frequencies, and exports to CSV. Our 3-color test image returned exactly those 3 colors.
• Bookmarks save colors, palettes and gradients, and in our retest they survived a restart.

Privacy and setup

• No network: our monitors saw no network connections from the app. It has no updater and no account.
• Self-contained: a ZIP of about 67 MB with no separate .NET install. It opened in about 1.5 seconds in our test, on Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit.
• It's unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn you on first launch. Check the SHA-256 on the product page.

Which should you use?

• You only need the HEX or RGB of something on screen, now and then: the Paint method above works and is built in.
• You want a picker plus conversions, WCAG contrast checks, palettes, CSS gradients and image color extraction in one offline app: Solace Color. It has no update checker, and our support is included.

Get Solace Color

Solace Color: screen color picker and converter for Windows, $27.14 one-time →

You get 12 months of support and a 14-day refund if the package can't start its core check.