Previously when I was running Mac OSX Snow Leopard I would use the built in tool ‘DigitalColor Meter’ to grab RGB values from my screen. Using the tool is is very quick to grab colours from websites, photoshop files, anything really.

When I upgraded to OSX Lion and opened the colour meter for the first time I realised that it had changed and I could no longer quickly grab colour values to use. I realised though by changing one of the menu settings I could get back the previous functionality; here’s how:

First open the DigitalColor Meter app, you can find it using Spotlight.

It looks like this, you’ll notice that the displayed values are in absolute RGB 0-255 values.

Select View => Display Values => As Hexadecimal

Now you can sample a colour simply by hovering over the colour you want. Once you are ready press Command + Shift + C. It should copy the hexadecimal colour to your clipboard.

You should be able to notice it is copying the colour as the Color item on the top menu will highlight monetarily.