What color is that? Designers check in.

Say you are designing a website. You are in the process of doing your research and look at other sites for inspiration. You come across a color that you really like and would like to use. How do you find out the code for that color? There are many ways to do that. For example, you could look at the source code of the page and try and search for it, or you could use Firebug or Chrome's inspection feature to determine the color. You could also press the Print Screen button, copy a screenshot to the clipboard, load a graphics editing program, create a new file, paste the screenshot from the clipboard, zoom in on the object, use the Pick Color tool, and finally copy the HTML code of the color to the clipboard. These are all cumbersome ways to get something so simple. So why not have a simple utility to do just that? Well, there is one. It is called Instant Eyedropper.

Instant Eyedropper is a utility that picks up and automatically pastes the color code of any pixel on the screen to the clipboard with just a single mouse click. This is all you need to do while using Instant Eyedropper:

1. Move the mouse pointer to the Instant Eyedropper icon in the system tray.
2. Press and hold the left mouse button and move the mouse pointer to the pixel whose color you want to identify.
3. Release the mouse button.

That's it. The clipboard now contains the color code - in HTML format (or any other format that you have previously specified). It can be pasted and used in any text or HTML editor or the Color Picker tool of Photoshop. Think of how much time you just saved!

Instant Eyedropper is a free software available for download.