Every other Friday, I will be telling you about two freeware programs I like to use and where to find them. Usually there will be one Mac program and one Windows program, since I use both platforms daily. All you will find on D:Illustration is real freeware: no nags, no adware, no shareware.

ColorMania: [1] from Blacksun Software, for Windows
Digital Color Meter: Mac

This week we’ll look at two free color apps: Color Mania for Windows; and the Digital Color Meter, a free app that ships with Mac OS X you may have missed.

ColorMania
Windows

ColorMania from [2] Blacksun Software is a color picker with an intuitive interface that allows you to pick colors from anywhere on the screen. The zoom feature allows you to zoom in up to 20X so you can easily sample the color from a single pixel. You can also pick colors from a color wheel or invoke the system color picker. Invert the chosen color, or click the Random button to let Color Mania pick a color for you.

ColorMania supports several color modes, among them HTML Hex, RGB Percentage, RGB Values, and CMYK, as well as several HEX choices for programmers. Choose the color mode and switch between them from a popup menu.

Right click the color wells and choose Save Color Here to save the active color in any of the color wells, and save the colors as a palette for use later. For any designer, web or print, this is a real asset. The Websafe colors popup menu puts named websafe colors at your finger tips.

All in all this handy little app just might become one of your indispensable applications—and you sure can’t beat the price: free!

Digital Color Meter
Mac OS X

Digital Color Meter is not strictly a freeware program in the sense that you need to go somewhere and download it; if you have Mac OSX you already have it, but you may not know it’s there. To find this hidden gem, g to the Applications > Utilities folder and look for Digital Color Meter. To keep this utility handy, drag the icon from the utilities folder to the Dock.

Digital Color Meter allows you to sample colors from anywhere on the screen. Set an aperture size with the slider at the bottom of the preview window, and the color your cursor is over will be displayed as an RGB color. If the aperture is more than one pixel, the colors will be averaged.

Make the aperture smaller to contain one pixel if you want to sample a particular color.

The RGB color is perfect for adding to a webpage. Use the popup menu to choose another sampling mode if you wish. Just press cmd + shift + C to copy it to the clipboard, and then paste it into your document. If you prefer to paste it as an image, copy to the clipboard using cmd + option + C.