ColorPop documentation

ColorPop samples any pixel on your screen and gives you the color in whatever form you need it. It keeps the ones you liked, so the color you found yesterday is still there today.

Installing

Open the downloaded ColorPop.dmg and drag ColorPop to your Applications folder. It lives in the menu bar under the eyedropper icon.

ColorPop needs no permissions. The eyedropper is macOS’s own color sampler, which does the sampling outside the app — so there’s no screen-recording prompt to grant, and nothing of yours is being watched.

Picking a color

Press ⌘⌥P from anywhere. The system loupe appears; click the pixel you want. The hex lands on your clipboard and the color is added to Recents. Nothing opens, so you can pick a color mid-sentence and carry on.

⌘⌥C opens the picker itself, and there’s an eyedropper button in its toolbar. If the picker is open when you pick, it gets out of the way while the loupe is up and comes back with the new color selected.

Recents

Every pick lands here, newest first, up to two hundred. Picking the same color twice doesn’t duplicate it. Remove one from its right-click menu, or clear the lot from the sidebar or Settings ▸ Colors.

Palettes

Recents is a shoebox; palettes are where colors go when you decide you want them. Click New Palette at the bottom of the sidebar — it opens with the name selected, so just type. Right-click a palette to rename or delete it.

Add a color from its right-click menu or the details pane. Select several at once — ⌘-click or ⇧-click — and file or remove them together. The same color can live in as many palettes as you like; naming it in one doesn’t rename it in the others.

Naming colors

A picked pixel is six hex digits, which tells you very little at a glance. ColorPop suggests the nearest known name — the SVG color keywords plus Apple’s own crayon names — so #F8B36C arrives as “Cantaloupe”.

It’s a suggestion, matched perceptually rather than by raw numbers, and always editable: click the name in the details pane and type. Colors with no close match keep their hex. Turn the whole thing off in Settings ▸ Colors.

System palettes

macOS ships several color lists and ColorPop shows them all: Apple, System, Crayons and Web Safe. They’re read-only — you can copy from them and add them to your own palettes, but not edit them in place.

Copy formats

Select a color and the details pane offers hex, hex with alpha, rgb(), rgba(), hsl(), SwiftUI, AppKit, UIKit, and a CSS custom property. There’s also As Color, which puts the color itself on the clipboard so you can paste it into another app’s color well rather than typing digits.

Alpha formats only appear for colors that have alpha. With several colors selected, each format copies all of them, one per line.

Contrast

Every color shows its WCAG contrast ratio against white and against black, with the verdict: AAA, AA, AA large, or fail. That’s the question you’re really asking when you wonder whether text will be readable on it.

Ratios ignore alpha, because a ratio needs a known backdrop and a translucent color doesn’t have one. The pane says so rather than quietly guessing.

Tints and shades

Each color comes with a ten-step scale through its own hue, numbered the way design tokens usually are — 50 through 900. Click any step to copy it, Copy as CSS for the whole ramp as custom properties, or Add to… to turn the scale into ten swatches in a palette.

Keyboard

• ⌘⌥P — pick a color, without opening anything.
• ⌘⌥C — show or hide the picker.
• ⌘F — jump to the search field.
• ↑ / ↓ — move through the list, even while typing.
• Return — copy the selection in your chosen format.
• Escape — leave the search field, or put ColorPop away.

Search matches names and hex values, so typing 3366cc or #3366cc finds it.

Settings

General — start at login, the menu bar icon, both shortcuts, updates and your license. Appearance — popover or window, popover dismissal, and which panes show. Colors — whether a pick is copied and in which format, automatic naming, and your library.

Where it’s stored

Your recents and palettes live in a single file: ~/Library/Application Support/ColorPop/library.json. It’s plain JSON — back it up, copy it to another Mac, or read it. ColorPop writes it safely, so an interrupted save can’t truncate it.

Updates

ColorPop checks for updates daily and can install them itself. Check manually from the … menu, or from Settings ▸ General.

Licensing

ColorPop is free to try. Every tenth time you open the picker, unlicensed, it shows a reminder — nothing is withheld and nothing expires. A license removes it.

Buy from the button on the ColorPop page, then paste the key into Enter License. One license covers your own Macs. ColorPop is also in the bundles.