Use Paint to read RGB color values

If you are looking for a tool to give you the RGB color values for some area in an image, don’t hunt any further. You already have it in your Windows PC. It is in Paint.

There are many occasions when the red, green and blue color values are needed. Here is a short procedure for getting those values.

With the item showing on your screen make a screen capture, either of the entire screen with the Print Screen key (PrtSc), or, if the picture is in a window of just that window, with Alt–PrtSc (hold down the Alt key and press the PrtSc key). This puts the image into your clipboard.

Open Paint on your desktop and press Paste. It is at the left end of the Home ribbon. Now you have a image in Paint with the area of interest.

The Color picker tool is the eye dropper icon in the Tools section of the Home Ribbon.

Click the Color picker tool and move the pointer, it now looks like an eye dropper, to the place where you want to read the RGB values. Click it.

The patch for Color 1 will now be the color of interest.

On the right end of the Ribbon click Edit colors. This brings up a small window for editing the color in the selected patch, Color 1 in this case.

In the lower right area the values of the current color are shown for Red, Green, and Blue.

Notice the large multi-color patch with a marker showing the color and the slider at right showings its intensity.

If you need the hex (hexadecimal) values, use the Calculator in Programmer mode. Enter the decimal values one at a time and note the hex values. This may be a bit cumbersome, but, hey it is free and already on your computer.

.:.

© 2016 Ludwig Keck