MyColorTools
MyColorTools → Color identifier
Color identifier — name any color from your camera or a photo
Point your camera at a wall, a shirt, a leaf or a paint chip and get the color's name along with its HEX, RGB, HSL, HSV and CIELAB values, live. No app to install, no account, and nothing ever leaves your device.
Open the identifier →Works without a camera too. Switch to Upload mode, drop in a photo or a screenshot, and tap any pixel. Handy on a desktop, or when the thing you want to identify is in a picture rather than in front of you.
How it works
A circle sits in the middle of the view. Everything under it is averaged — not a single pixel, which would be at the mercy of sensor noise and JPEG artefacts — and that average is the color being reported. You can drag the circle anywhere on screen, and change its diameter from 5 px to 200 px in Settings; small for a thin wire or a thread, large for a textured wall you want the overall reading of.
The name comes from matching that average against a list of named colors by perceptual distance in CIELAB — a color space built so that equal numeric distances look like equal differences to the eye. Plain RGB distance is the obvious alternative and it is noticeably worse: it will happily call two colors close when nobody would agree they look it.
Two naming levels are available:
- Simple (48 names) — everyday words. Red, teal, olive, maroon. Right when you want a plain answer, and the level to use if you are helping someone who just wants to know what color their shirt is.
- Extended (1,520 shades) — the specific names. Cadmium orange, payne's grey, tea rose. Right when you are matching paint, yarn or a brand color.
What you get for every color
| Value | Looks like | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Cadmium orange | Describing it, searching for paint or thread |
| HEX | #ED872D | CSS, design tools, anything on the web |
| RGB | 237, 135, 45 | Image editors, code, LED and lighting control |
| HSL / HSV | 28°, 84%, 55% | Adjusting a color rather than replacing it |
| CIELAB | 66.0, 33.5, 57.6 | Comparing two colors by how different they actually look |
| Contrast | 3.4:1 on white | Checking text legibility against WCAG AA and AAA |
Getting a reading you can trust
The values are exact for the pixels sampled — but a camera reports the color of the light reaching it, which is the object's color multiplied by the light falling on it and then processed by the camera. That gap is where the mistakes live. To close it:
- Use even, neutral light. Daylight from a window on an overcast day is excellent. Warm domestic bulbs pull everything orange; the assist filters cannot undo that, because the information is genuinely gone.
- Kill the glare. A specular highlight is the color of the lamp, not the object. Tilt until the shine moves off the area you are sampling.
- Fill the circle. If the circle overlaps an edge, you get the average of both sides — a color that exists nowhere in the picture.
- Pause before you read. A frozen frame stops the number dancing while you copy it, and lets you sample several points on the same shot.
- Beware auto white balance. Phones re-balance continuously. If the reading drifts while nothing is moving, that is why — pause and take the frozen value.
- Keep the shot, not just the number. The download button in the tools row saves the frame you are looking at as a PNG — the plain picture, or the corrected or simulated one if an assist filter is on, with the filter baked into the pixels.
When the number has to be authoritative — matching a client's brand color, quality-controlling a print run, calibrating a display — a phone camera is the wrong instrument. A reference chart or a colorimeter measures under controlled illumination and is what those jobs need.
Who uses it
People matching things
Touching up a wall and the paint tin is long gone. Finding embroidery thread that matches a fabric. Working out what shade a car actually is. Sample it, switch to the extended name list, and search for that name.
Designers and developers
Grabbing a HEX code out of a photograph, a printed sample or a screen you cannot use a picker on. On desktop the explorer also offers the browser's native EyeDropper for sampling anything on screen, and every sampled color reports its contrast ratio against white and black.
Colorblind users
The most common use of all: getting a name for a color you cannot reliably tell apart. Is this shirt green or brown? Is that wire red or orange? Is the fruit ripe? The color-vision assist filters sit on the same screen, so you can also see the view with confusable colors pulled apart.
Students and teachers
Hue, saturation and lightness stop being abstract when you can point a camera at something and watch the numbers move. The harmony wheel and the LAB space explorer show where a color sits among all the others in three dimensions.
Frequently asked
Do I need to install an app?
No. It runs in any modern browser on iPhone, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. Add it to your home screen and it behaves like an app, but there is nothing to download and nothing to update.
Does it work offline?
Once the page has loaded, yes — every part of the identification runs locally. There is no network call to make, because there is no server involved.
Are my photos uploaded?
No. Camera frames and uploaded images are decoded and measured in the browser. Palettes and game scores are stored on your device. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Why does the camera not start?
Browsers only allow camera access over HTTPS, and only after you grant permission. Check the
address bar starts with https:// and that the site is not blocked in your
browser's site settings. Upload mode works regardless.
The rest of the toolkit
- Colorblind simulatorProtan, deutan and tritan simulation, plus a colorblind-glasses preview.
- Palette generatorPull a palette out of any photo and export it.
- Color gamesFour quick games for training your eye.