How to get RGB values from a photo

A practical guide from the makers of Color Picker from photos

RGB describes a color as three numbers — red, green and blue, each from 0 to 255. RGB(102, 159, 165) and #669FA5 are the same color written two ways. If your tool asks for RGB (many print workflows, video apps, game engines and older software do), here's how to read it straight off a photo.

When you want RGB instead of hex

• Software that only takes numbers. Some dialogs have three number fields, not a hex box.
• Programmatic color. Many APIs and frameworks take 0–255 or 0–1 channel values.
• Comparing colors. It's easier to see that two colors differ mostly in the blue channel when you read RGB.

Reading RGB from a photo on iPhone

1. Open Color Picker from photos and choose the image — from your library or the camera.
2. The palette extracts automatically. Tap the color you care about.
3. The detail view lists HEX, RGB and HSL together. Tap the copy button next to RGB to copy it as text.

Because all three formats are shown for the same swatch, you never need a converter: read RGB for one tool and hex for another from the same screen. There's also a SwiftUI snippet if you're writing iOS code.

Understanding what you copied

A quick way to sanity-check an RGB value: the higher the three numbers together, the lighter the color; the closer the three numbers are to each other, the more gray it is. RGB(240, 240, 238) is near-white; RGB(60, 42, 24) is a dark brown. HSL, the third format in the detail view, makes this explicit — hue as an angle, then saturation and lightness as percentages — which is why designers often use HSL to reason about a color and RGB or hex to implement it.