Hi,

In the Freeware application ColorPic, I was able to grab screen colors using the Magnifier/Color picking tool.

How can I do this in ColorPro?

David

In ColorPro you can use the magnifier tool to see the HEX color of every pixel on the screen (this happens when you check the "Colors" checkbox inside the Magnifier Window). This HEX color (for example 2FAFFC) can be entered into any chip by double clicking that chip and pasting the value into the input box which appears. In the next version of ColorPro 2.0 (to be released in a few weeks) the adding of this color value to the current color chip in the current "Edit Palette" palette will be done automatically by pressing a short cut (for example: CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+G) while the Magnifier Window will be active.

Please notice that if you want to edit the chip color value you must do some settings (once) because by default ColorPro is configured to show the Color Name of a color chip and not the actual color value of that chip:
- go to the Settings section and open the ColorPro Behaviour tab
- check either :RGB or HEX radio buttons (in the Render New Palette As) section
- if you checked RGB above then make sure that the "When Palette is Rendered As RGB Always" setting has the "Color" radio button checked for both Show and Edit
- if you checked HEX above then make sure that the "When Palette is Rendered As HEX Always" setting has the "Color" radio button checked for both Show and Edit
- save the settings and quit the Settings tab. Now you can edit the value in the ColorChip by double clicking it
We realize this is a cumbersome way for grabbing screen colors but this will be fixed in the next version of ColorPro 2.0 which is only a few weeks away (2 or 3) and will also have the following improvements:
1. Color Chip shapes can now be:
- rectangles
- ellipse
- rhombus
- honeycomb1
- honeycomb2
2. Color Pickers show now extra color spaces:
- RGB
- HSV
- CMYK
- HSL
- YUV
3. Color complement selection (based on Hue). Selection of complements is available from a "star" like figure.
4. Color Chip/Palette wide color value modification by applying addition or substraction of:
- RGB sliders (add/substract individual R, G, B channels or all R, G, B channels at once)
- CMYK sliders (add/substract individual C, M, Y, K channels or all C, M, Y, K channels at once)
- HSV sliders (add/substract individual H, S, L channels or all H, S, L channels at once)
5. Color Chip/Palette wide color value modification by applying filters :
- INVERSE, GRAYSCALE, SEPIA, BLACKANDWHITE, GRAYANDWHITE
- NOHUE, NO, NOVAL, FULLHUE, FULLSAT, FULLVAL, HALFHUE, HALFSAT, HALFVAL, DOUBLEHUE, DOUBLESAT, DOUBLEVAL
- + Same filters as above for R, G, B and C, M, Y, K channels
6. Searching palette is now possible in the 'Palettes' tab. Search is done by Name, description, number of chips, palette type, user color name of the chip, user color description of the color chip and user color key of the color chip.
7. Exporting palettes is now available also in the following formats:
- Image (BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, TIFF)
- HTML
- CSS

Nico,

Thanks for the informative response. Considering I just purchased ColorPro today, is there some kind of upgrade available for 2.0?

Secondly, I really liked the ColorPic selection mechanism, and it looks like you're going to reuse it here in this application. Couple of questions:

1. Would it be possible, through settings, to always indicate Colors and Hi-Lite for the Magnifier tool?

2. Can you program this tool to capture the mouse so that a left-mouse-button click will capture the color under the cursor instead of performing an action?

3. Will I be able to use the "Show Color Names" option and still be able to select colors through the Magnifier tool?

Thanks,

David

The upgrade to 2.0 will be free. Thanks for the suggestions for the upgrade, we'll certainly keep them in mind.