ColorClerk2.1 A color picker for macOS

Every pixel has a name.

Lift any color off your screen. ColorClerk tells you what it is called, whether text will read on it, and hands it over as HEX, OKLCH, SwiftUI, Tailwind or ten other formats your code already speaks.

Download on the Mac App Store $1.99 USDPay once. No subscription. See it work

30,282 named colors, plotted in OKLab

Hover to read. Drag to turn. Click to pick.Tap a speck to pick it.

01Window

Small window. Whole job.

Two hundred and sixty points wide, and it covers everything between spotting a color and shipping it: the current and previous swatch, contrast, the code field, a picker, sliders, fields and your palettes.

This one works. Drag the square, slide the hue, switch formats, hit Copy. It drives the rest of this page, too.

Contrast 2.2 : 1Fail 9.7 : 1AAA Lc 62
174°
100%
HSB Hue174.4° Sat76.5% Bri76.9%
This Page (5)

Actual size. The window is 260 by 600 points.

02Lift

See it. Click it. Paste it.

The system eyedropper, a click away in the toolbar, the menu bar, a global shortcut of your choosing or the Shortcuts app. The color is on your clipboard the moment you pick it, already in the format you use.

Swimmers Pool #2DC5BB Copied
Recent

Sampled something outside sRGB on a P3 display? It gets a P3 badge and a color(display-p3 …) value, so nothing is quietly clipped.

03Convert

Fluent in hex. And thirteen other dialects.

rgb()The cube

Red, green and blue, zero to 255. Every screen is built on it, so it is where every color starts.

hsl()The cylinder

Hue around, saturation out, lightness up. Easy to nudge by hand, uneven to the eye.

oklch()The landscape

Lightness, chroma and hue, spaced the way eyes see them. Where modern CSS is heading, and where ColorClerk builds its shade scales.

rgb(45 197 187)

Same color, three coordinate systems. ColorClerk keeps one value at full precision and writes it out however you ask, so switching formats never drifts.

All fourteen, for Swimmers Pool.

    Copy As sits on every swatch, in the Color menu and in the menu bar popover. Paste any of these back into the code field and ColorClerk reads it.

    04Read

    Know what you are holding.

    Every sample comes with its WCAG ratio and APCA Lc against white and black, right under the swatch, and the closest of 30,282 color names. The field on the right is every one of those names, sorted by the text that reads on it.

    Swimmers Pool#2DC5BB
    Aa2.2 : 1FailLc −40
    Aa9.6 : 1AAALc 62

    05Keep

    A palette that files itself.

    Palettes of up to fifty swatches, as many as you need, saved as you edit. Drag to reorder. Take them anywhere: Adobe .ase for Photoshop and Illustrator, GIMP .gpl, CSV, Design Tokens JSON, CSS variables or an Apple .clr list, every swatch with its name.

    This page (0)

    Everything you pick on this page lands here.

    Adobe Swatch Exchange, for Photoshop and Illustrator, with every name.

    Add Shades of Current Color

    Eleven steps from 50 to 950, built in OKLCH so they look evenly spaced, each one pulled into sRGB.

      06Stay

      Lives one click up.

      The last sample, your recent samples and Sample Color wait in the menu bar. The window can float on top, tuck away into the menu bar or open at login. On macOS Tahoe it wears Liquid Glass; before that, and with Reduce Transparency, it stays flat. Check for Updates… asks the App Store for the latest version, only when you choose it.

      ⌘C
      Copy the current color
      ⌘V
      Paste a color in, any format
      ⌘= ⌘−
      A brighter or darker step
      Your keys
      A global shortcut for the pipette
      Shortcuts
      Sample Color From Screen, Get Current Color, Convert Color

      Go on, pick one.

      Download on the Mac App Store

      $1.99 USD · Version 2.1 · macOS 14.6 or later · No accounts, no tracking, no clutter

      07Write

      Say hello.

      A format you miss, a bug you hit, a palette you are proud of. Write, and the person who makes ColorClerk writes back.