Just Color Picker

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on February 14, 2013

The basic color picker that has been a part of Windows for ages is fine for most uses. It can create any color your PC's graphics can render. Millions of different shades and hues are possible. But graphics professionals, software designers, programmers, photographers, and artists need more than it offers, such as the ability to specify colors by code number in a variety of formats. Anny's Just Color Picker is just the sort of program these users need. It's a compact tool that loads and works quickly. You can select areas as small as a single pixel and fine-tune your selection's values. Just Color Picker can also help you work more efficiently with its hot-key-based selection process. Best of all, it's free.

Just Color Picker's user interface opens in its main view, which is about the size of a minimized media player and displays three small windows: the color, a crosshair-defined selection area, and a file list. We chose a color format. Just Color Picker supports HTML, RGB, RGB (0,1), HEX, HSB/HSV, HSL, and HSL (Win). The selection window displayed a magnified view of whatever we aimed our cursor at, with the raw value in the color window. We simply had to press Alt + X, the default hot-key combo, to select the color and display its numerical value in the Copy Value field and the main file list. At first we worried about typing the hot keys while holding the cursor steady, but the hot keys are easy to activate with one hand, and you can change the key combo if necessary. Pressing Copy Value copied the number to the Clipboard. Small arrows toggled open the color-editing tool, which offered RGB and HSV options and highly accurate sliders with position markers.

Just Color Picker includes an online manual, multiple interface languages, and color wheels. It's portable freeware that works in Windows versions from 2000 to 8. If you need or want a better color picker that does much more than the built-in Windows tool, try Just Color Picker.

Publisher's Description

From Anny:

A free color picker and color-editing tool for web designers, photographers, graphic designers and digital artists. Features five formats of color codes: HTML, RGB, HEX, HSB/HSV, and HSL; averaged color sampling for easy handling of color noise; 3x, 9x and 15x magnifier for greater precision; color list for saving and reusing the picked color samples; user's comments and notes for each picked color; conversion of HTML, HEX and RGB color codes into the corresponding colors; Red-Green-Blue (RGB), Cyan-Magenta-Yellow (CMY) and Red-Yellow-Blue (RYB) color wheels with marked triads and complementary colors; two harmonious color finders (With this feature you can quickly find a good combination of colors, for example, for your web site. Simply choose the primary color of your design, and the color picker will offer a few colors harmoniously matching with it.); RGB, HSV and HSL color editors for adjusting and editing the picked colors; gradient transition between the two latest-picked colors for creating a wide range of in-between hues; text tool for evaluating the readability of the selected font and background color combinations; optional stay-on-top behavior; user-defined hotkey to capture color info; copying the color code or its selected part to the clipboard just by one button click. Multilingual interface: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Taiwanese, Thai and Turkish. In addition, the Just Color Picker is a portable program and can be run directly from a USB memory stick with no installation required. Easy-to-use and highly functional tool for anyone working with color.

What's new in this version: Version 3.3: The standard HSL color editor has been added. A minor bug in HSL color picker has been fixed. Text tool now also displays bold header. French and Dutch interfaces have been updated.