posted on September 23, 2011 by Saikat Basu
Graphic artists no longer need to have an eye for color. With the kind of tools available these days, you could be color blind and still do your image just right. Okay, that was an extravagant exaggeration, but as we have seen with the previous article on 3 Free Color Picking Tools to Choose Colors From Your Desktop choosing colors from the numerous hues around you has become dead easy.
Eyedroppers and color pickers can work outside a mammoth graphic tool like Photoshop and CorelDraw. Most of these tools are small and portable. But today, we will diverge from desktop color picking tools and look at five browser based ones.
After all, a graphic artist can take his inspiration from anywhere…and if it’s anywhere online, a few very useful Firefox add-ons could come real handy.
ColorZilla
This advanced eyedropper tool for Firefox is top of the heap as it shows the maximum number of downloads and a good bunch of good reviews. As you can see in the above screen, ColorZilla has quite a few functional features like an Advanced Eyedropper, Color Picker, Page Zoomer, Palette Browser, and a CSS Gradient Generator.
- The Color Picker dialog box is very similar to that in Photoshop.
- In case you have a problem picking up a colored pixel, you can zoom a webpage to a maximum of 1000% and use the eyedropper to pick up the color of the pixel. Auto-copy of pixel values to the clipboard makes it easy to paste it in your HTML editor or elsewhere.
- You can use the Palette Browser to pick up colors from the different palettes available and also save user created ones.
PixelZoomer is a neat Firefox add-on that takes a screenshot of the visible area of your webpage and gives you a few pixel mapping tools to work with the image in a separate window (or tab).
- A selection tool helps to select an area and estimate precise measurements
- You can zoom the screenshot to 3200% and pick up the color of any pixel with the eyedropper tool.
- The eyedropper tool can pick up color values and copy the HEX code into any other application.
- You can use it as a simple screenshot tool as it allows you to save the image as a PNG file.
Rainbow Color Tools is actually a set of four powerful tools. For a web designer, the tools are very intuitive as they are almost one or two click operations.
- Inspector â€" You can move your mouse over any pixel on a webpage and get a preview of the color and the HEX values (you can change this in the settings). A single click copies the pixel values to the clipboard for pasting elsewhere.
- Picker â€" The color picker helps you pick up HSV and RGB values, and the typeface of any element on the webpage. The more precise pixel tool helps you take the color values of any image pixel.
- Website Analyzer â€" This is a quick tool which gives you the color scheme from the current website’s images and CSS. You can choose to copy or save the color values.
- Library â€" if you choose to save any of the colors you pick up, they enter the library where you can view them again in the color picker and reuse them in any other application.
Firefox Add-ons Gallery gives you two more color picking tools (Firepicker and Rainbowpicker) based around a simple color picker dialog box. These three Firefox add-ons are good allied options for the web designer who wants to quickly pick up colors while browsing the web. My pick of the three is Rainbow Color Tools for its ease of use and HEX value copying mechanism. Which one is yours? Do you have at least one of these three tools in your list of add-ons?
Image Credit: Shutterstock
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