Color pickers are one of the essential tools for a web designer. There were days when I hit print screen, then opened photoshop to paste the screenshot and then pick the color from this. But, now i use much more simpler tools for the purpose. Here are some free tools.

1) ColorPic

This is perhaps the most popular color picking software. It is just 501kb and runs on all Windows systems. It has a magnifier attached. Using it, you can grab palettes of up to 16 colors at once and use four advanced color mixers to select a spectrum of possibilities.

• Colors shown in hex and decimal
• Adjust Hue, Saturation, Value, Red, Green and Blue values
• Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black percentages shown
• Resizable magnification area
• Overlay a grid for quick colorpicker alignment
• Use arrow keys to nudge mouse pointer
• Save multiple palettes of colors automatically
• Snap to nearest WebSafe color
• Point sample, 3×3 or 5×5 pixel color sampling
• Adjust color with four advanced color mixers
• Edit colorpicker values after selection easily

2) Instant Eyedropper

Instant Eyedropper is my choice of color picker. I use it, because of its extreme simplicity. Instant Eyedropper will identify and automatically paste to the clipboard the HTML color code of any pixel on the screen with just a single mouse click. Its just 375kb and works on all Windows machines.

Picking a color is a simple 3-step process :

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 and your clipboard now contains the color code.

3) Absolute Color Picker

Either of the above two tools mostly suit anyone. I just included Absolute Color Picker to round of the list to 3. This also works on all Windows machines.

• History of selected colors – up to 12 slots to save the color in
• Screen eye-dropper – pick any color directly from screen
• HTML color conversion
• Customizable color selection dialogs: select only hose color models that are convenient for you
• Many predefined color palettes
• Compare current and previous color
• Customize brightness, hue, saturation and other parameters separately to match your exact selection

Do you know any other better color picker that is free ? If so, share it in the comments.