How to Use the Color Picker in Photopea to Sample Logo Colors

The short answer

To sample a color in Photopea, select the Eyedropper tool (keyboard shortcut I) and click the color you want in the open artwork. That color becomes the foreground color. Click the foreground swatch at the bottom of the toolbar to open the Color Picker, where you can read and copy the color's hex code and numeric values.

Two tools are involved. The Eyedropper samples a color from pixels on the canvas. The Color Picker is the dialog that displays, edits and lets you type in color values. For logo work, the hex code is usually what you need. A hex code is a six-character value, such as #1A2B3C, that encodes the red, green and blue amounts of a screen color.

Step-by-step: sampling a color from logo artwork

• 1. Open the logo file in Photopea through File > Open, or drag the file into the browser window.
• 2. Zoom in on the area you want to sample, so you can clearly see a flat region of color away from edges.
• 3. Press I or choose the Eyedropper from the toolbar. In Photopea, it may share a toolbar slot with related tools. If so, long-press or right-click the slot to find it.
• 4. Check the options bar at the top for sampling settings, such as whether the tool reads the current layer or all visible layers. Choose the setting that matches where the logo color actually sits.
• 5. Click inside a solid area of the color. The foreground swatch updates to the sampled color.
• 6. Click the foreground swatch to open the Color Picker. Copy the hex value, and note any other values shown that your workflow needs.
• 7. Close the dialog without changing anything, unless you intend to adjust the color.

Many painting tools in Photopea follow the Photoshop convention: holding Alt (Option on a Mac) temporarily turns the tool into an eyedropper. This is handy when you are already working with a brush. The Eyedropper tool itself is still the most explicit method.

Verifying that the sample is a real logo color

An eyedropper reports the color of the exact pixel you click. That pixel is not always the color the designer specified. Check the result before treating it as a brand value.

• Sample several points within the same shape. In clean artwork, the hex values should match. In compressed files, they will vary slightly.
• Avoid edges. Anti-aliasing is the smoothing that blends edge pixels with the background, so edge samples produce in-between colors that are not part of the palette.
• Be cautious with JPEG files and screenshots. Compression and screen capture can shift colors. A sample from them is an approximation, not a specification.
• Check whether blending modes, opacity or adjustment layers affect the area. Sampling all layers returns the composite you see on screen. Sampling one layer returns that layer's own pixels.
• Paint a small swatch of the sampled color next to the logo on a new layer and compare the two at high zoom.

What a sampled color can and cannot tell you

A sampled hex value describes how the color appears in that particular file on screen. It does not reliably give you the brand's official print values. Those include CMYK, the four-ink process used in standard printing, and spot colors from a named matching system. Converting a screen sample to print values is an estimate that depends on color profiles and output conditions. If the logo is going to print, ask the brand owner for their documented color specifications or official artwork rather than relying on a converted sample.

Sampling a logo's colors also does not give you permission to reuse the logo or its palette. That depends on the rights holder. Likewise, a file opened in Photopea is not necessarily vector artwork just because of its extension. If a PDF or SVG contains embedded raster images, sampling them has the same limits as sampling any pixel image.

Gaps in this guide

No version-specific documentation was available when this guide was written. The exact names and locations of Photopea's Eyedropper options, such as sample size settings or layer sampling choices, and the color models shown in its Color Picker may differ from what is described here. Check the options bar and dialog in your current version of Photopea.