Making A Desktop Color Eyedropper in Python to Grab Color Values
Goal: recreate my resume in the dark Atom text editor theme (background and fonts). Sub-goal: find a color eyedropper to grab the actual color values of the Atom layout.
Approach #1: find an Atom eyedropper package to grab the colors. My first thought was to find the easiest solution, within the packages of my Atom text editor. After searching Atom's packages, the two best potential solutions were "an-color-eyedropper" and "color picker" . The an-color-eyedropper description sounds perfect: "A simple "real" color picker. By "real" I mean it's able to pick colors anywhere on any screen."
Color picker an color eyedropper
Unfortunately it failed to install and displayed the error, "Unable to download 400 Bad Request Repository inaccessible". It seems to rely on the "python" Atom package which is now deprecated. I was unable to find a repo anywhere by googling.
Color picker has easy-to-follow instructions and installed with no problem. It allows you to quickly select any color visually with sliders. Then the RGB or Hexadecimal values of your color are added as text in the editor in proper format. However, we are looking for a color grabber to pull colors from a screen object. This is more of a productivity enhancing and color exploration tool for programmers. On to Python options.
Approach #2: Use the python tkcolorpicker package to grab the colors.
The first thing I found on Google was tkcolorpicker, a package that uses the tkinter library. I couldn't tell exactly what it was, so let's find out. First, install via pip install:
python -m pip install tkcolorpicker
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 | import tkinter as tk import tkinter.ttk as ttk from tkcolorpicker import askcolor root = tk.Tk() style = ttk.Style(root) style.theme_use("clam") hex_code, RGB_code = askcolor((255, 255, 0), root) print(hex_code, RGB_code) root.mainloop() |
askcolor() returns a tuple with both the RGB and hex codes selected by the user. Above, we are unpacking that tuple into the hex_code and RGB_code variables.
Approach #3: Use the Python eyedropper package to grab the colors.
I then found eyedropper for Windows, which has a minimalist repository and offers a simple approach to desktop eyedropper functionality. Install eyedropper via pip:
python -m pip install eyedropper
Hover your mouse over the object you want to grab the color from (in my case, the Atom text editor background). Alternatively, I was able to run eyedropper from the command line by entering:
py -m eyedropper
Mission possible. Then I hit ctrl+v in a text file and there was the hex code for my Atom background. Some of the colors that eyedropper grabbed were nearly identical to those in the Atom text editor dark theme. Others were not quite the same. I made slight eyeball adjustments to the colors for some of the fonts.
Using Python to convert hex to RGB
Microsoft Word uses RGB codes but eyedropper gave us hex. To convert, I found this website practical and quick. Alternatively, you could convert a hex code to RGB with python:
1 2 3 | hex_code = input("Enter hex: ").lstrip("#") RGB_code = tuple(int(hex_code[i : i + 2], 16) for i in (0, 2, 4)) print("RGB =", RGB_code) |
Bonus: use pd.read_clipboard() docs to get the hex codes.
Once eyedropper sends the color values to your system's clipboard, there are multiple ways to access them. This alternative uses pandas.
Installing pandas and pyperclip with pip:
1 2 | python -m pip install pandas python -m pip install pyperclip |
On Linux, install xclip or xsel
sudo apt-get install xclip
To get the clipboard contents with pandas:
1 2 3 4 | import pandas as pd hex_code_df = pd.read_clipboard() print(hex_code_df.head()) |
Supplementary Notes and Links
- Here's a Python eyedropper script featuring the pillow and xlib libraries that I was unable to get working.
- I didn't try ColorCop for Windows, but it may be a non-Python alternative.
- Did you know? Python 2 had a ColorPicker module that is not in Python 3.
- How pandas read_clipboard method works
- pandas to_clipboard and read_clipboard source code
- This desktop tool has great U/X and an eyedropper feature. It runs on Electron, a Javascript based framework. Coincidentally, Electron was used to build Atom.