How do I pick a colour from another program on screen?

Use the pipette. In Vectornation by Zaweba it picks colours from anywhere on screen, not only from your own canvas, so you can take a colour from a web page, a photo viewer, a PDF or another app. A magnifier shows the pixels under the pointer, so you can land on exactly the shade you want rather than an edge or a shadow.

This comes up all the time. A client sends a screenshot of their website and asks for the same blue. A photo has the perfect green for a background. A PDF from another designer uses a colour nobody wrote down. Being able to pick it directly saves guessing by eye.

Picking the colour

Put the source on screen next to Vectornation, with the colour you want visible.

Select the object you want to colour, choose the pipette and move the pointer over to the other program. Watch the magnifier and pick the colour. It goes into your fill or stroke, whichever is active in the fill and stroke pair under the tools.

Then look at the value in the Colour panel, which works in Grey, RGB, HSB, CMYK, Lab and web modes. Copy down the numbers if this is a colour you will need again.

Getting the right colour

Pick from a flat area. Text edges, gradients and photographs are made of many slightly different pixels. Zoom in on the source if you can, and use the magnifier to choose a pixel from the middle of a solid area.

Be wary of compressed images. A JPEG or a low quality screenshot can shift colours slightly, especially in reds. If the colour matters, ask for the official value as well.

Remember what you are picking. The pipette sees the colour as your screen shows it. That is right for web and screen work. For print, treat a picked colour as a starting point, then check it with soft proofing.

Making the colour last

Save it as a swatch. Vectornation supports swatch groups, global colours and spot colours, and a global swatch updates every object that uses it if you change it later.

Add it to a library. The Libraries panel keeps colours, graphics and text styles in local files available to every drawing, so a client's colours picked once are there for the next job too. You can also export swatches as ASE, ACO, GPL or CSS, which is handy when a web developer needs the same values.

If the colour is meant to be a printed spot ink, load your spot colour book and snap to the nearest colour, so the picked value becomes a real ink a printer can mix.

For print jobs

Use View > Colour proofing to see how the picked colour will look in CMYK with your printer's profile. Bright screen colours often look duller in print, and it is better to know before the job goes out.

A related tool

If you often need to pick colours outside any drawing program, Colour by Zaweba is a small separate screen colour picker. Inside Vectornation, though, the pipette does the job without leaving the app.

Vectornation by Zaweba is free software for Windows that works offline and needs no account.