AdesClrPicker – Replacing Photoshop for all your Color Picking Needs
Posted by Jon Lee in Sponsored, Web Development, tags: AdesClrPicker, color, Efficiency, review, web-design
Here’s a situation I’m sure many of you web developers out there have come across. You’re designing a new Google Adsense ad and you want it to blend with your background but you’ve forgotten what the HEX value of your background color is! So you take a screenshot of your page, fire up Photoshop, create a new document, paste the screenshot, whip out the color picker, and use the eye dropper tool on the screenshot to find the hex value of your background. There has got to be a better way!
Ades from AdesBlog.com has a nice site called AdesDesign with a whole bunch of resources, tutorials and tools for web developers. Some of these resources are free and some aren’t. One of these tools is AdesClrPicker (Ades’ Color Picker). It essentially streamlines the problem described above and does much more as well.
Overview
AdesClrPicker v2.0 is a small application (about 2 megs installed) that sits in your system tray and has a relatively small memory footprint. Once “activated”, your cursor becomes an eye dropper tool with a magnifying window following it for pixel-perfect precision. This magnifying glass is really a great idea. It lets you select the exact pixel you want very easily.
Color Codes
Once you find the pixel you wish to select, a simple left click will copy that color to your clipboard in the form of a color code. You can specify between HTML, RGB, Delphi, C++ and VB. For web development, you’d only really care about the HTML code (i.e. #FFCC66) and maybe the RGB code if you’re doing graphics design but clearly Ades created this useful piece of software with more than just web development in mind!
Lest you Forget
These color codes are not only copied to your clipboard, but the last 10 color codes you’ve selected are automatically saved in your history list that is accessible by right clicking the tray icon or by activating the floating menu. You can then easily select between any of these 10 colors with a single click. Great if your site uses a color scheme with many shades of a color!
Color Library
As if all those features aren’t enough, there’s also a color library where you can store any of your previously selected colors as well as manipulate them with hue, saturation, and brightness sliders. These libaries can be saved, loaded and even exported into .ACO or .ACT format to be imported into Adobe Photoshop (if need be). Also, the floating menu has quick shortcut buttons to add your latest copied colors into the library.
The color library is probably my favorite thing about the whole program. The first thing I did when I first ran the program was to put all the main theme colors of all my different sites into separate files. I can really see this saving me a lot of time in the future.
Room to Improve
This tiny little program is jam packed with very useful features for web developers and web designers. Although it’s very well designed and I can tell that a lot of work has been put into it, there are a couple spots where I can see room for improvement.
The magnifying feature is great for pinpointing the exact pixel but the eye dropper cursor itself seems to be off by a pixel or two. From my experience, pointers and tools usually have their focus area on the tip of the cursor.
Second, I would like to see an option to remove the system tray icon. My computer already has too many icons in the system tray, it doesn’t really need one more. Since the program supports keyboard shortcuts, I see no issue with having it hide completely in the background until the shortcut combination is pressed.
Give it a Try
This program isn’t free but you can download a demo to try it out. The only limit the demo imposes is that it only allows you to copy color codes in RGB format. If you decide that you like it, you can get the full version complete with HTML coding for $9.99 right now (that’s $10 off the regular price)!
Now even though this is a sponsored post, I truly believe that this program is great for improving efficiency and I’ve already found it useful after using it for only a couple days. I’ve bought the full version for myself to start using, and hopefully Ades will implement some of the suggestions I mentioned above in the next version. Oh yeah, if you buy a copy now, you get an upgrade to the next version for free 
And if you decide this program isn’t for you, there’s plenty of other stuff on AdesDesign.net like free website templates and web design tutorials. I would also recommend Ades’ blog for a lot of interesting reads.
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