Color identifier: what color is this?
Click a colour in any photo — or type its code — and get its name, its colour family and the closest named shades, measured the way your eye sees difference.
Describe this colour
Get a plain-English description, the names designers and fashion or paint brands tend to use for similar shades, its mood, and three colours that go with it.
Sends only the HEX codes and your note — never the image. AI output can be wrong; check contrast with the numbers above.
How colour families are decided
The family label comes from the colour’s hue angle, saturation and lightness. Hue decides red, orange, yellow, green, teal, blue, violet, purple or pink; lightness adds “pale”, “light”, “dark” or “very dark”; low saturation adds “muted”, and very low saturation makes it a grey. Dark oranges are reported as brown — which is exactly what brown is.
The named matches come from a list of around 5,000 names, so a close match (ΔE under 3) is common. Where no name is near, we still show the nearest, labelled honestly.
Need the codes in another format? Use the HEX to RGB or HEX to CMYK converters.
Questions people ask
How do I find out what colour something is?
Upload a photo and click the colour, or type a HEX/RGB code. The identifier gives a plain-English family (e.g. “muted dark teal”), the closest named colours with how close each one is, and all its codes.
Where do the colour names come from?
From the open-source “color-name-list” project (MIT licence), a curated “best of” set of about 5,000 names. Matching uses perceptual distance (ΔE in OKLab), not raw RGB numbers.
Can it find the Pantone or paint colour?
No — Pantone, RAL and paint-brand libraries are proprietary, so we don’t claim official matches. Use the HEX code with the brand’s own colour-matching tool, or ask a printer for a physical swatch comparison.
Why does the same object give different colours in different photos?
Lighting, white balance and camera processing all shift colour. A white shirt under tungsten light photographs orange. Sample from the best-lit, most neutral photo you have.