How-To Use the Windows Color Picker

Microsoft has built a Windows Color Picker, here is how you can use it

Are you a graph designer or a UX engineer who is always trying to find the exact color code for the color you once saw in a picture and now you just can’t make a color look like that? Like me, did you also try to download the picture and open it paint so you can use a color picker to extract the exact color hex code? Well, that might be quite a specific description but if you match that, you are in luck, for Microsoft has built its very own color picker and like most other Microsoft tools, it’s a very nice and easy-to-use tool. However, it doesn’t come built-in with Windows.

It comes with a set of tools called the Microsoft PowerToys, which is a set of utilities for power users to tune and streamline their Windows experience for greater productivity and is built by Microsoft itself.

Some of the bundled tools include an amazing FanzyZones; a Windowing manager utility that makes managing multiple windows a breeze, PowerRename; a bulk renaming utility that allows you to rename files using regular expressions, KeyboardManager, a key remapper, and much more. It’s like an experimental wing of Microsoft that makes cool Windows tools to increase productivity without worrying about the ordinary PC user who doesn’t need these tools confusing them. Here is a list of currently available features you can get using PowerToys,

One of these amazing tools is a Color Picker which is quite simple and just has one function, to be available anywhere at the distance of just a few key clicks, and to be able to tell you the exact color code of whatever you are pointing to on the screen.

Here is how you can use it,

Downloading and Installing Microsoft PowerToys

  1. Head over to the GitHub releases page for Microsoft PowerToys.
  2. Download the .exe file for the latest stable release from the page. In the screenshot below, we have demonstrated how to download the .exe for Release v0.25.0.

We have a complete downloading guide available to help you install PowerToys. Once you are done with the installation, proceed with this guide below.

Using the Color Picker

Just launch PowerToys and once it is running,

  1. Open the image/screen where you want to check the color.
  2. Press Windows Start + Shift + C to launch the color picker.
  3. Point to the color you want to know the hex code for, as shown in the screenshot below.
  4. Once you find the exact color, just click there to copy the color code to your clipboard.
  5. Paste it anywhere.

You can launch PowerTools settings for the Color Picker by clicking on the little PowerTools icon from the bottom-left.

From here, you can choose the following things,

  • Enable / Disable Color Picker
  • Shortcut keys
  • Color code appearance