

ColorSnapper 2 - okonet
http://colorsnapper.com

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afandian
I was once trying to match a colour from a logo in a PDF. Using the included
'DigitalColor Meter' that ships with Mac OS X.

When displayed on the Macbook Pro screen it registered as one colour. On my
Dell monitor it registered as something slightly different. When I used that
the colour in CSS, the colour rendered differently to the original image, and
DigitalColor Meter reported that there were different values between different
browsers (Chrome and Safari) and different screens.

And none of these visually matched the colour of the original image on either
monitor.

Not sure if it was gamma adjustment, colour calibration, drivers, graphics
cards... in the end I gave up and did the best I could.

I'm not sure why you'd want to buy a utility that replicates already built-in
software, but one great value-add point would be to disentangle all of this
nonsense.

~~~
adanmayer
It's complicated :) but I try to explain: On OSX you can use AppKit and
related frameworks to create an app or browser like Safari. All colors are
subject to Color Management and are converted to your Display profile.

So Safari takes CSS color values assumes they are in sRGB and converts them to
your display profile. For Chrome and Firefox this is a different story. They
use their own render engine so no conversion takes place here. This is the
reason why colors differ between Safari and Chrome/Firefox.

ColorSnapper recognizes if you pick from a Color Managed App and converts the
color back to sRGB. There might be a slight difference because of rounding
issues, but it's the best you can get.

As for picking from PDFs or Adobe Photoshop: this depends on the app you are
using (Preview App, Adobe Reader etc.) and if they have their own Color
Management, but that is a little beyond this post. We will soon write a blog
post about that on [http://colorsnapper.com](http://colorsnapper.com)

~~~
thedudemabry
Thanks for the explanation. I love focused products like this with a
borderline insane attention to detail. I'm giving the free trial a shot right
now.

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vladikoff
If you want a free color picker for OS X see Sip:
[https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/sip/id507257563?mt=12](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/sip/id507257563?mt=12)

~~~
afandian
If you want a free colour picker for OS X, it comes with one included
("DigitalColor Meter").

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robin_reala
The original is one of my most used Mac apps: being able to pick any colour
from any program with one keystroke and a click, then to paste the hex into my
text editor with one more keystroke has been invaluable. No idea whether
version 2 is worth paying for again, but a quick scan of the site makes it
look good.

~~~
adanmayer
The new version supports some cool new features. eg.: Hi-Precision Mode: When
activated it increases zoom and slows down your mouse so you can pick any
retina pixel on screen - currently no other picker offers this.

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on_and_off
Very nice color picker, especially thanks to its magnifier tool.

The 'Android' format is not very useful though :

It outputs in the 'Color.argb(x,y,z)' format which is almost never used in
Android development but does not support the infinitely more useful android
xml format : <color name="color_name">#FF112233</color> .

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agjmills
kind of windows equivalent:
[http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.php](http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.php)

If there's a Linux one, I'd be interested

~~~
agjmills
Never mind, found gpick

~~~
windsurfer
Wow, gpick is much better than gcolor2, which I was using before. Thanks!

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hartator
Still using Fireworks and its color picker tool. What a great tool and what a
shame Adobe is shutting it down.

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wefarrell
I read this as 'ColonSnapper'. I might be the only one.

