Often I find myself needing a convenient way to pick colours for CSS files and various other things, pretty much every single day. Unfortunately, it has always been a bit of a hassle, with no convenient tool for doing so – certainly opening up something like Photoshop just for choosing a colour is not ideal! I know there are hundreds of these out there already, but somehow none of them really worked for me. I decided to write (another) one, with the really imaginative name of Colour Chooser.

I wrote the first version of this app several years back and it did just enough to get by, however it was always lacking somewhat. I decided the time had come to finish it off and make it a little bit more useful, and make it available for general use.

It provides for choosing a colour using the standard Windows colour picker, choosing from the screen, and copying the colour out in either hex form (#7DACBF), or in CSS RGB form (rgb(125, 172, 191)). It also allows varying the opacity of the colour which adjusts the second output to include the alpha channel (rgba(125, 172, 191, 0.6)). You can also type in either of the colour boxes to update the colour display.

In addition, it provides the ability to check the contrast of the colour against black, white, or any other colour in a palette (useful for WCAG/accessibility checking), and options to darken/lighten a colour.

Install

• Download Setup
• Download ZIP

Alternatively, install using Scoop:

scoop bucket add markembling https://github.com/markembling/scoop-bucket
scoop install markembling/colour-chooser

Hopefully you'll find it useful. If you feel there's something missing, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Known Limitations

• When picking a colour from the screen, the mouse cursor doesn't change. It will capture the colour from the cursor's hotspot but the specific shape of the cursor will be dependent on the content beneath it.
• If the choose from screen option is disabled, it is probably because the application is running with too little trust. This could happen if the file needs unblocking or is running from an untrusted location.
• There is no automatic update mechanism built-in. The latest version will always be available to download here but it won't let you know if there's a new one.
• The setup file is not signed, so Windows might initially block the file. I'd love to address this but code signing certificates are super expensive.

Changes

March 2012

• Added the ability to create a palette of colours and read/write several different palette formats. This makes it ideal for saving sets of colours for designs or whatever else for later use, and use across a team. The UI has been updated accordingly, with options for opening and saving palettes.

November 2013

• Added a contrast analysing tool.
• A few other minor feature additions.

May 2014

• Several bug fixes, including the long-standing issue of lightening or darkening certain colours resulting in grey instead of the correct answer.