ColorPop app icon
Mac · iPhone · iPad

ColorPop

Your palettes, one shortcut away — over whatever app you’re in, and on whatever device you picked up. Sample a pixel, name it, file it, and copy it in whatever form your code wants.

ColorPop is included in my bundles, along with over twenty other apps.

▦

Palettes that stay yours

Build palettes of your own and file colors into them, several at a time. Every pick lands in Recents first, so nothing goes missing on the way. Bring palettes in from Adobe swatch files, GIMP palettes, color lists or straight out of a stylesheet. The library is plain files you can back up.

☁

The same palettes on every device

Name a palette on your Mac and it’s on your iPhone before you’ve put the Mac down. Each palette syncs as its own file over iCloud, so two devices editing different palettes merge cleanly instead of one clobbering the other. The color lists installed on your Mac travel too. Recents stay on the device that picked them.

◉

On iPhone, sample the world

There’s no screen to eyedrop on a phone, so ColorPop samples a photo instead — or a frozen frame from the camera — with a 10× loupe so you can see the exact pixel under your fingertip. Nothing is recorded or sent anywhere.

⌖

One shortcut, from anywhere

⌘⌥C opens the picker over whatever app you’re in. ⌘⌥P skips it entirely and goes straight to the eyedropper — no window at all, just the hex on your clipboard.

◐

Contrast, before you ship

WCAG ratios with AA/AAA verdicts, and APCA — the algorithm behind the next standard — side by side. Select two colors for the reading in both directions, which is where the two disagree.

⌘

Copy it the way you need it

Hex, rgb(), hsl(), SwiftUI, AppKit, UIKit, a CSS custom property — or the color itself, for another app’s color well.

Screenshots

The ANSI Terminal palette open with Magenta selected, showing its RGB and HSL values, WCAG contrast verdicts, a tint and shade scale, its complement, analogous, triadic and split-complement harmonies, and the grid of copy formats
The colour adder: a saturation and brightness pad with hue and opacity strips, the hex shown as #4595E6 and named Aqua, and a picker choosing which palette the colour lands in
The Crayons list shown as a grid with two swatches selected, their contrast against each other in the details pane, copy formats for the pair, and the menu open to add both to a palette
ColorPop as a floating window searching for “blue”, beside Settings showing the copy-on-pick format menu and the automatic colour naming option

On iPhone and iPad

The same palettes, in your pocket.

ColorPop is a native iPhone and iPad app too, running the same color engine as the Mac. There’s no screen to eyedrop on a phone, so it samples a photo instead — or a frozen frame from the camera. Your palettes arrive over iCloud, and the color lists installed on your Mac come with them.

It’s the same App Store purchase as the Mac app — buy it once and it’s on all your devices.

ColorPop on iPad — the Neons palette in a three-column layout, with values, contrast, scale, harmonies and copy formats alongside
ColorPop on iPhone — sampling a color from a photo of pink flowers, with the magnified loupe showing the exact pixel and the hex underneath

Get ColorPop

On the App Store for Mac, iPhone and iPad — one purchase covers all three — or free to try as a direct download for the Mac. A license for the direct build removes the occasional reminder and supports the work. Requires macOS 14, or iOS 17 on iPhone and iPad. Buying more than one app? ColorPop is included in my bundles.

Support

Questions or bug reports? Email ben.dansby@gmail.com and you’ll get a reply, usually within a day or two.

For how-to documentation, see the ColorPop documentation.

For privacy questions, see the privacy policy.