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.

Importing palettes

ColorPop reads the palette formats people actually pass around:

• Adobe swatch files (.ase), from Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Adobe Color, Affinity or Coolors. CMYK and Lab swatches are converted to RGB, and each group in the file becomes a palette of its own.
• GIMP palettes (.gpl), which is also what Inkscape, Krita, Aseprite and Lospec use.
• Color lists (.clr), the Mac’s own format, including palettes someone exported with Add to System Colors.
• Text: anything with hex, rgb() or hsl() colors in it — a stylesheet, a Tailwind config, a design-token file, a coolors.co link. A color written as --brand-blue: #3366CC keeps the name brand-blue.

To fill a palette you’ve just made, use Import… under the mixer while it’s empty, and choose a file or the clipboard. To make new palettes instead, use Import Palette in the … menu. Or drag files in: onto a palette in the sidebar, or onto its list, to add them to that palette; anywhere else in the sidebar to make new ones.

Names that only repeat the color, like Illustrator’s R=51 G=102 B=204, are dropped so the color gets a real name instead (see Naming colors).

On iPhone and iPad, import from the sidebar’s + menu or an empty palette’s Import Palette button, drop files onto a palette, or open a palette file in ColorPop straight from Files, Mail, Messages or AirDrop.

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 #FBCB72 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 is measured against white and against black — the two backdrops it actually lands on — by two standards at once, with the color read as the text in both. That’s the question you’re really asking when you wonder whether text will be readable on it.

WCAG 2 is the one in every accessibility checklist today: a ratio from 1:1 to 21:1, with the verdict beside it — AAA, AA, AA large, or fail.

APCA is the algorithm behind the next standard. It reports an Lc value rather than a ratio, and instead of a pass or a fail it names what that contrast is good enough for: preferred, body text, content, large text, any text, non-text, or invisible. The point of it is that readability is a slope, not a line.

They disagree, and that’s the useful part. APCA is built on how light a color actually looks rather than how much light it reflects, and it’s far harsher on light text over a dark background — so a mid-tone that WCAG passes at AA on black can land well short of body text beside it.

Two colors at once

Select a pair and both standards measure the colors against each other instead of against white and black. WCAG gives one number: its ratio is symmetric, so which color is the text makes no difference to it.

APCA gives two, because its number is directional — light-on-dark and dark-on-light aren’t equally readable at the same gap, and the algorithm treats them separately. Showing only one of them would be choosing which way round you meant.

Alpha

Both ignore it, because contrast 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.

The details pane

The pane on the right shows everything ColorPop knows about the selected color. If some of it isn’t useful to you, turn it off in Settings ▸ Inspector — values, either contrast standard, the scale, harmonies, copy formats and palette actions each have their own switch, and whatever you leave on closes up the gap.

The color itself — its swatch, its name and its hex — always stays. To hide the pane altogether rather than pare it back, use the toggle in the title bar or Settings ▸ Appearance.

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. Inspector — which sections of the details pane you want. 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.