What color is that?

If you want to know the exact color of something on your screen, you need a color pipette, which is exactly what Pipette is. This little tool allows you to see exact values for any color on your screen.

Pippete doesn’t need installation, and can be run from a USB thumbdrive too. The interface has a window that shows the selected color, and underneath are representations of that color in lots of different formats. Pipette covers RGB (as absolute values, percentages and in hexadecimal notation), CMY, CMYK, HSV, TColor and XYZ (CIE) color formats. Each of these values can be quickly copied to your clipboard with a single click for use in other programs.

To select a color, you click and hold the Pipette button, then move the mouse cursor to the place on the monitor you need. When you release the mouse button, Pipette will remain where you left it, so you can use those color values however you need. Pipette’s useful if you’re doing some design, and you want to grab a color you like from somewhere. The multitude of color formats is good, but in all honesty it’s overkill – for most jobs RGB will be enough.

Overall, this is a fine application for grabbing absolute color codes. The last neat feature of Pipette is its inbuilt color list, which saves the values of the colors that you have analyzed. This isn’t saved when you close the program, but is a useful way of keeping hold of values while you work.

Pipette is a simple but useful application that allows you to copy exactly any color you come across on your computer.