A few days ago, Microsoft unveiled a redesigned PowerToys Run launcher with a Windows 11-like aesthetic and new features. As it turns out, Run isn’t the only tool for getting a fresh coat of paint. Microsoft has released an early preview of the upcoming PowerToys Color Picker remake.

PowerToys Color Picker is a neat utility that, as the name suggests, allows you to get color codes in various formats, such as HEX, RGB, HSL, HSV and many others. In addition, PowerToys creates a palette containing similar to the selected color shades. You can launch the PowerToys color picker by pressing Win + Shift + C (almost all PowerToys shortcuts are customizable) and get a color from every pixel on the screen.

After activating the color picker, move the mouse cursor over the color you want to copy and right-click the mouse button to select a color. If you want to see the area under the marker in more detail, scroll up to zoom in.

The copied color will be stored in your clipboard in the format defined in settings (default: HEX).

The editor allows you to see the history of (up to 20) selected colors and copy their representation in any predefined string format. In the PowerToys settings, you can define which color formats are visible in the editor and in which order they appear.

A pull request posted on the PowerToys GitHub repository Describes the proposed change:

This PR moves ColorPicker from ModernWpf to WpfUI and introduces a fresh new UX, matching the Windows 11 design language.

You can see how the current UI compares to what’s to come:

And here is the new version in action:

PowerToys is an open source set of utilities for Windows 10 and 11, which means that any user with the necessary skills can contribute to the development of the project on GitHub. As for regular customers without development knowledge, they can get PowerToys from its GitHub repository, The Microsoft Storeor a wing.