Color Picker: grab any color on screen with one click

You need an exact color — from a client's logo, a website, a photo, a presentation. The classic route runs through a screenshot, opening an image editor, and the eyedropper tool. The Color Picker module from the free PowerToys suite shrinks the whole ceremony to one click: a shortcut activates an eyedropper right over your screen, you hover over the color and click — the color code is on your clipboard.

How to do it

1. Install PowerToys (Microsoft's free toolkit) and confirm the Color Picker module is turned on.
2. Press Win + Shift + C — the cursor turns into an eyedropper with a magnifier showing zoomed-in pixels, so you can hit exactly the right spot.
3. Hover over the colored spot and click. The color code (in HEX format, e.g. #1A73E8) copies to your clipboard.
4. After clicking, an editor opens with a history of collected colors — for each one you also see it written in other formats (RGB, HSL), and you can fine-tune it, say darkening it a shade for button text.
5. You can set the format that gets copied, and what happens after a click, in the PowerToys settings — anyone who just wants to “grab a color and go” can turn the editor off entirely.

A typical scenario

A marketer is assembling banners for a client and needs the background to match the brand color exactly. No brand manual anywhere, the logo only sits in the website header. Instead of digging the color out via a screenshot and an editor, they press Win+Shift+C, click the logo, and paste the code straight into Canva. The whole thing takes five seconds — and the color is exact, not “eyeballed close enough.”

A developer equivalent: a designer sends a screen mockup as an image. Before the source file turns up, you pull colors straight out of the mockup with the eyedropper and the CSS can start right away. The editor's history also keeps the whole palette together, so you can come back to the colors even a week later.

What you get out of it

• Accuracy: “almost the same blue” is obvious at a glance — the eyedropper returns the exact code, not a guess.
• Speed: minutes with a screenshot and an editor become one click; you can even pull a color from a video or a running app that a screenshot would distort.
• History: collected colors stay in the editor — when refining a palette, you come back to them without collecting them all over again.

Pro tip

The eyedropper's magnifier can zoom in even further: scroll your mouse wheel to enlarge the pixel preview and hit even a one-pixel line or text color that would otherwise blend into the background's font anti-aliasing.

One more note on shades: the color on your monitor may not exactly match what others see — monitors differ in calibration. The eyedropper gives you the exact code that's in the data, which is what matters for the work; just don't sign off on a final palette by eye on your own display alone.