: Gimp: Pick color on screen without taking screenshot Sometimes I want to quickly use a color that I see on a picture, website or program. I usually take a screenshot then open it in Gimp

@Radia289

Instead of using Gimp for this, you can do much the same thing in the Windows Paint program. You still have to take the screen shot. When you have the screen shot, open Paint and paste the shot in and pick the color you want. You can do that in the time it takes for Gimp to open. Just click the Color Picker tool and in XP click Colors > Edit Colors > Define Custom Colors - or in Win10 just click Edit Colors - and it'll come up with a color mixer tool, similar to Gimp's, that'll tell you the color values of the color you picked (and let you edit it).

* * * O R * * *


Download & install PicPick. This is a screen capture utility that includes an image editor, color picker, color palette, pixel-ruler, protractor and more. It is very well behaved and uses minimal system resources. With it you can easily pick the color values you want in HTML or RGB.

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@Pierce403

You can use the color picker button in GIMP's color selection dialog or dockable (the one that opens e.g. when you change the foreground or background color).



It works like this:


you click the button
you click anywhere on your screen
the color is set


You will encounter one issue, however:

On 32 bit Windows platforms, the only color you'll be able to pick this way is black - this is a problem in the Cairo library on those platforms, see bug reports bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=676708 for GIMP and bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69617 for Cairo.

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@Angie364

When I want to do it to a picture or website I use ColorZilla, a plugin for Google Chrome.

It's basically a colour picker tool that sits in your browser's toolbar just like the one in GIMP and it tells you the #rrggbb value of the colour (and copies it to your clipboard so you can paste it in any app, including back into GIMP).

Given the name ColorZilla, it probably exists (or once existed) for Firefox, too.

Unfortunately it won't help you if you want to pick a colour outside of your web browser, say in another application.

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@Vandalay110

I think this is exactly what you are looking for: instant-eyedropper.com/
It runs in tray and it is very minimalistic.

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@LarsenBagley460

Something like GPick might work. I'm making the assumption that you're using Linux of some flavour.
www.webupd8.org/2009/08/mult-platform-color-picker-gpick-linux.html

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@Cody3331749

I would comment rather than answer but I'm not able to.

This is not really an issue with GIMP but how to extract colour codes from an image you see in your browser. In order for GIMP to work with a picture you have to feed the program with an actual image. I don't know of any extension that enables you to use the GIMP tools outside of the program (please correct me if I'm wrong). However there are several tools on the web to extract the colour codes of a pixel of content you see on the web. The most convenient may be a browser plugin, such as Rainbow Color Tools for Firefox: addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/rainbow-color-tools/ This however is only a solution for web content.

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