Sampling colours anywhere on screen with Paint by Zaweba

Matching a colour exactly is a daily job: a brand blue from a website, a skin tone from a reference photo, a wall colour from a paint chart someone emailed. Paint by Zaweba gives you three tools for it, each suited to a different situation. The pipette samples from anywhere on your screens, the Eyedropper samples from your document, and the Colour Sampler tool keeps an eye on several points at once.

The pipette: any pixel on any screen

Next to the hex field in the Colour panel sits a small pipette. Click it and you can sample any pixel on any monitor, in any app, not just inside Paint. A loupe magnifies the area under the pointer so you can hit a single pixel, and a hex readout shows the colour before you commit.

Click to set the foreground colour. Hold Alt to send it to the background colour instead. Press Esc to cancel without changing anything.

This is the quickest way to pull a colour from a web page, a PDF, a video frame or another design program. Open the source next to Paint, click the pipette and point.

The Eyedropper: sampling your document

The Eyedropper tool works inside your document. Its most useful setting is the sample size. A single pixel can be misleading, because photos are full of tiny variations and noise. The Eyedropper can average 31, 51 or 101 pixels, which gives a far more representative colour for a patch of skin, sky or fabric.

You can also choose whether to sample the current layer only or the current layer and the layers below. Sampling only the current layer is right when you are matching a colour on that layer. Sampling below as well is right when you want the colour you actually see, for instance when painting on an empty layer over a photo.

The Colour Sampler: watching points

The Colour Sampler tool places points on the picture, up to ten of them, and their readings appear in the Info panel. They stay put while you work, so you can watch how an adjustment changes those exact spots.

That is invaluable for colour correction. Put a sampler on something that should be neutral grey, like a pavement or a white shirt in shade, and adjust until its red, green and blue are equal. Put samplers on a highlight and a shadow to make sure neither clips. Put one on a face to keep skin tones steady while you grade the rest of the picture.

Accurate sampling

Use averaging for photos. A single-pixel sample of skin may land on a pore or a highlight. An average of 31 or 51 pixels gives you the overall tone.

Sample from the original, not a compressed copy. A JPEG screenshot can shift colours slightly; if you can get the brand's published hex code, use that and confirm by eye.

Check the colour mode. A colour sampled from screen is an RGB colour. If you are designing for print, check its CMYK values and the gamut warning in the Picker before relying on it.

Mistakes to avoid with sampling

Sampling the current layer only when the layer is empty returns nothing useful; switch to sampling below. Sampling a shadow area for a base colour gives a colour that is too dark everywhere else; sample a mid-tone area. And with the pipette, remember that screen colour can be changed by a monitor's settings or a night-light mode, so do critical matching with those turned off.

Together with Swatches and the Info panel, these sampling tools make it easy to keep colours consistent across a project in Paint by Zaweba.