Many web developers and designers rely on matching up just the right colors to make a web page or design look it’s best. And while there are many websites (like ColourLovers) that can provide you with color palettes to choose from, sometimes you may have an image on your computer that you want to grab the color HEX code to use in a website design. That’s where a built-in Apple utility called DigitalColor Meter comes in.

First, open DigitalColor Meter (located in /Application/Utilities). The DigitalColor Meter window will open, giving your a few options. First, you will notice that as you move your mouse around on the screen and point to things, the aperture (the larger block) will adjust to reflect the color you’re pointing at. The values at the side will also change to reflect that color value.

The color shown in the smaller block will be the exact color that the meter is representing as R (red), G (green), and B (blue) values in the labeled fields. The values gained from pointing at objects is the value that you can use in Photoshop or an HTML/CSS design to get the exact color.

By clicking on the drop-down menu, you can select between a variety of different color space schemes, from RGB as Percent, Actual Value, and Hex, to Y’PbPr to Y’CbCr, to CIE and Tristimulus.

Selecting “RGB as Hex Value, 8-bit” will give you the color code that you can use for web design. Adobe Photoshop also recognizes these values.

As you can see, if you deal with color Hex or RGB values, the DigitalColor Meter built into Mac OS X can be a time saver and allow you to match just the right color for your projects.

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