Visual Color Picker is one of the most handy little utilities around (and it’s free!).  It’s basically a stand alone, all purpose color picker for Windows.  It’s got all the little sliders and swatches you’d expect in a color picker.  There are separate sliders for red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, black, hue, saturation, and lightness, as well as several different 2D sliders to choose from.  There are the basic color swatches and swatches where you can save custom colors.  There’s also the option of selecting from a list of named colors, if you’re so inclined.

Both HTML and RGB color codes for your selected color are displayed in the main window, ready for cut and paste.  You can also type or paste color codes in the HTML and RGB fields, and Visual Color Picker will display the corresponding color.  There’s also a handy Color Preview window that allows you to see how different colors look together.  There are different preview modes for hyperlink text, gradients, and solid colors.  In this preview window you can also find color codes for programming languages such as VC, VB, and Delphi.

By far the most useful feature of all is the Screen Area Capture.  This is similar to the eye dropper tool in Photoshop, but you can grab a color from anywhere on your screen!  There’s a little capture window that shows a zoomed in view of the area around wherever your mouse is on the screen.  You can adjust how much the capture window zooms, so you can easily pick out a single pixel of color if you need to.  Just position your mouse somewhere around the color you want to grab so it shows up in the capture window, then press the shift key to lock on to that area.  Once locked on your can move your mouse freely and the contents of the capture window will stay the same.  Then just go over the the zoomed in capture window and pick the color you want.

Simple, handy, just works, and it’s free!  Hard to beat that. You can download Visual Color Picker for free from it’s official website. It’s compatible with all versions of Windows from 95 to Vista.  They don’t list Vista on their site, but I’m using it in Vista right now and it works just fine.  ;)  Enjoy.