A desktop color picker with saved palettes and contrast checker
Short answer
A screen color picker lets you grab the exact color of any pixel on screen and read its hex, RGB, or HSL value. AppRig includes an eyedropper that captures any on-screen color, saves it into named palettes, generates shade ramps, and checks WCAG contrast ratios, so designers and developers can pick, store, and validate colors without a separate app.
The manual way
Windows itself has no general-purpose screen eyedropper. PowerToys adds one through its Color Picker module, and most design apps have their own built into the app, but there is nothing system-wide that works from any window.
Without one of those, the fallback is to take a screenshot, open it in an image editor, and read the pixel value from there. That works for a single color, but it is several steps for something that should be instant, and it gives you no way to store or organize the colors you pick, let alone check whether two of them have enough contrast to be readable together.
The faster way with AppRig
AppRig’s Colors sub-tool gives you a screen-wide eyedropper: click it, then click any pixel on screen, and the color lands in a Recent palette as well as any named palette you have set up for a project.
Click a saved swatch to see it broken down into HEX, RGB, HSL, and HSV cards, each one click to copy. From there you get a generated shade ramp running from 50 to 900, plus a WCAG contrast row backed by a full AA/AAA contrast checker, so you can confirm text and background colors will actually be legible before you ship them.
See the full AppRig how-to in the docs →
Related questions
AppRig does this and more, all in one local-first Windows app. See what AppRig does →