How to get the hex code from a screenshot on an iPhone
Screenshots are how most people capture a colour they want to reuse — a brand colour in an app, a shade on a website, a palette in a design. Sampling one on a phone is the awkward part. Here is what works.
Why this is harder on a phone than on a desktop
On a desktop you have a cursor, a mouse, and often a developer-tools eyedropper. On a phone you have a fingertip, which covers roughly forty screen pixels. Tapping a specific pixel in a screenshot with your thumb is not precise, so a picker that only supports tapping will hand you the colour from near the pixel you wanted and no way to tell.
The fix is a magnifier you can position before you commit, plus the ability to zoom into the image. That is exactly what PaletteViva does on a touch screen: pinch to zoom, drag to move the sampling point, watch the magnifier, then tap to lock.
The steps
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1
Take the screenshot as normal. Press the side button and volume-up together. It saves to Photos as a PNG.
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2
Open the picker and choose the screenshot. Tap “Upload an image” and pick it from your library. Nothing is uploaded — the file is read by your browser on the phone.
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3
Zoom in, then drag to position. Pinch the image to zoom. A screenshot is small in pixel terms, so zooming is what makes the target pixel big enough to see. The magnifier at the top right shows the pixels around your sampling point with a grid, and outlines the pixel that will be read.
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4
Tap to lock, then copy. Tapping locks the value, and it stays at the top of the panel while you scroll or keep exploring. If the area is anti-aliased or a gradient, switch the aperture to 3×3 so you get the colour the region reads as rather than one noisy pixel.
Where screenshots help, and where they mislead
A screenshot is ideal for a flat colour: an app background, a button, a chart series. It is PNG, so no compression has altered the values, and it carries no camera colour profile to reconcile.
It is a poor way to capture a photograph of a physical object, because the camera has already interpreted the scene: white balance, tone mapping and JPEG compression have all had a go at your colour before you ever sample it. And if you screenshot a photo that was originally shot in Display P3, the screenshot may preserve values your target screen cannot display. See sRGB vs Display P3 for what to do when that happens — the panel will tell you when it does.
On Android
The steps are the same. One extra option: if you install the page from your browser's menu, it can appear in the system share sheet on Android Chrome, so you can share a screenshot straight into the picker without going via the photo library. Safari on iOS does not support being a share target, so on an iPhone the upload route above is the one to use.
Related
- HEX, RGB, HSL and OKLCH explained — what each value your screenshot produces actually means, and which to use where.
- How palette extraction works — useful when you want the whole palette out of a screenshot rather than one colour.
- How we handle images — the verification steps for the privacy claim if you are deciding whether to upload a client's screenshot at all.