Screen Color Eyedropper

You spotted a color in a PDF, in a paused video frame, or in an application that is not even a browser window, and you need the HEX code to reproduce it. The usual route is a screenshot, an image editor, and its eyedropper tool, which burns a few minutes per color. The browser itself has a shortcut for this.

The pick button calls the EyeDropper API: your cursor turns into a crosshair, you click anywhere on screen, and the browser hands back the HEX of that pixel. The page then fills the color swatch and converts the value into RGB and HSL across the three output fields. There is a manual path too, since typing a HEX into the input accepts both the three-digit shorthand and the six-digit form and runs the same conversion.

The API ships in Chrome and Edge from version 95 and in Chromium-based browsers generally. Firefox and Safari do not implement it, so the page shows an amber notice and falls back to the manual HEX field. Clicking any output field copies its value to the clipboard. The reading covers exactly one pixel, so on a JPEG-compressed or noisy photo neighboring pixels differ noticeably: aim at a flat area. Nothing leaves your machine.