 Do you want to use Stream Deck to activate the Apple Color Picker? Well, if so, stick around. I'm gonna tell you how to do it in this video. Hello, welcome to Take One Tech. My name's Alec, and in this video, I'm gonna show you about a technique that I've been using to pick off the color of the screen for all of, oh, about five minutes. I've literally just been shown how to do this today, and so I wanted to share it with you all as well, because it is something that is really useful. If you are someone who uses the Apple Color Picker to be able to go and just click on the screen to pick out a particular color, let me just show you what I'm talking about, shall we? This thing here, the Apple Color Picker. By the way, I did do a full video all about this because it's something that I think a lot of people overlook some of the functionality of it, so the way that, as well as obviously being able to choose a picture from this familiar rainbow wheel here, or whatever you want to call it. You can also do this by adjusting the various different codes for either RGB, CMYK, HSBC, HSBC. Not the bank, HSB, and gray sliders. And there's various other different ways you can do it, and you can save different palettes and all this sort of stuff. So, as I say, I did do a full video all about the functionality of the Color Picker, and I'll leave a link to that directly above. However, I hadn't been able to actually activate this with Stream Deck, and it wasn't something, to be honest with you, that I'd really thought about until I saw a video, I think last week, by Nutty on their channel, which was this one. Here, Stream Deck plugins you have to try out. And one of those Stream Deck plugins, by the way, I'll leave a link to that video in the description, one of the plugins that they were recommending to try out was a Color Picker plugin for the Stream Deck, which enabled you to basically just grab any color off the screen with a touch of a Stream Deck button, and then it would save that, and then you could paste the hex code in or whatever you wanted into whichever application you were working in. It was really useful, I thought. Went to try and install it on my Stream Deck, and then realized it was a PC-only plugin, of which there are quite a few on Stream Deck, and so they hadn't made the Mac version of it, so I kind of wrote it down on a list, must get round to figuring out how to do that, and never got round to it in the last week. Anyway, just today there was a question asked in the, or a comment made in the Discord group with .rocksdiscordgroup, link in the description, from Eileen mentioning this video and wondering if there was another way to do this on the Mac as well, and then to the rescue came Dina with a great suggestion and an app that I'd never even heard of, so thank you, Dina, I'll leave a link to Dina and Eileen's channel, obviously, in the description as well. Eileen's got loads of great tutorials, and if you're feeling hungry, then definitely head over and check out Silver Lining Homeplace Dina's cooking channel, so let's have a little look at this application because it's basically the Apple Color Picker as a standalone application, but with some great little features added into it, so basically you need to go to the Apple App Store and then search for the System Color Picker app, again, link will be in the description, of course, and when you open that up, if we look at the familiar Apple Color Picker, which looks like this one, if I open up this System Color Picker app, it looks like this, so it looks pretty similar, doesn't it? In fact, let me bring the other one up on screen as well. You've got the same controls along the top, so we've still got the color wheel, we've got the different sliders, the pallets, uploading an image and the different pencils with the different colors in. Well, this has got exactly the same along the top, and it does actually just bring in all of your settings from the Apple Color Picker as well, so any ones that you've saved, so if I come in here, these are all my saved pallets, those are all in there ready to go as well. It's got the familiar swatches down at the bottom, but then what it's also got is these extra fields here, where are they gone? These ones, so you'll notice that it's got these things in here, and basically that is as you are picking a color with the eyedropper, then it is just showing you the hex codes there for them and all the different other codes that you've got as well. There's also some other built-in functionality because it's got a few keyboard shortcuts, so let's have a little look at those, shall we? In fact, let me get this one out of the way, and then I'll just get up the keyboard shortcuts. So here, once you've activated the Color Picker, so I'm gonna use this, and let's just take one. I'm gonna just pick a color out of these swatches, but it doesn't really matter. So there you go, I've picked out a color there. You can see how it's put in the hex code, and then it's got these other codes for different ways to refer to the colors, and there is a couple of hotkeys that you can use here. So now that I've actually used the Picker, and by the way, there is a shortcut for the Color Picker as well, just Command P, so that is the way to activate that Color Picker. In fact, let's look at my desktop color, shall we? Now what I can do is, now that I've used the Picker to pick the color, I can then go in and just use this keyboard shortcut, Shift Command H, and that's gonna copy the hex code of that particular color. So if I was to open up a little notes file one second so that we can just prove that this is working, there we go. Now if I just do Command V to paste, that has pasted in the hex code of that color that I've just picked. Pretty neat, if you want to copy the RGB, for example, Command Shift R, then we've got that one, paste that one in, in fact, did that do it? Let me do that again. Command P, whoops, a daisy. You see, you've gotta be in the application, but don't worry, I've got an even better shortcut for this in a moment. So if I am in the Color Picker application, the shortcut works, so I'm gonna pick that, then I need to do Command Shift R to copy it and then I'm gonna come into my text and I'm gonna paste that in there and there you can see we've now got the RGB. So it's great that you've got all these keyboard shortcuts but you do need to be in the app in this way for it to work but there is a better way to do all of this and that's what I'm gonna show you and that's the one that we're gonna program into the Stream Deck. Personally, I almost exclusively work with hex codes in what I'm doing, so the one that I would want as a Stream Deck button is I just want a button to be able to press it and know that it was just gonna copy the hex code of wherever my mouse happened to be at that time and then I'd just go and paste it into whatever application I wanted to use that in. So that is my sort of use case of it but I'll show you some variations we can do on that and what we're gonna do is I'm gonna come back into the Color Picker app and then I'm going to open the preferences. So I'm coming over to just the main menu and preferences and this is gonna open up the preferences for the app. So this is basically how it looks when you first start it up. This is the default preferences and the first one is stay on top. So that just means that this window is gonna stay on top of all the other windows. Even if that is the active window, you can see this one is still hovering over it. So like that. So then we've also got the option to have it show in the menu bar instead of in the dock because at the moment it is running as an application and so it is sitting in my dock. Well, I'm gonna have this just running in the background because I do this sort of thing quite often. So I'd rather have it just running in the menu bar and running all of the time when I've got the Mac open. So it's always ready to be used when I need it with my stream deck. So I'm gonna go ahead and change this one to show in menu bar instead of in dock. And that has now added it up into my menu bar. The next thing I want to do is launch at login. So I definitely want that happening because I want it to basically launch every time my Mac starts. So it's always there ready to use. Hide the menu bar icon. Well, I'm not actually gonna do that because I use bartender to organize my menu bar. I did do a video all about bartender. So I'll leave that just up above as well because that allows me to organize all of the different menu bar icons that I've got so that it's not too cluttered with too many icons. So no point to hide the menu bar icon for me. I still want it accessible there. And then when clicking on the menu bar icon, what do we want it to do? You can either have it show the color sampler, toggle the main window on and off or just show the menu. So there is a little drop down menu for what I'm gonna be using this for. I probably am not gonna be activating it from the menu bar itself too much. I'm literally just gonna be using this stream deck button. So I'm just gonna leave that one as it is for now. Next one, I'm gonna go up to the color here. And here you've got some different options. So with hex codes, at the moment, the way it's displaying the hex codes, if we look down at this little note here, you can see it's got the hex code. It's in sort of a mixture of, well it's in lowercase letters and numbers. There hasn't got the sort of pound sign or the hash sign in front of it. And so you can choose to have those if you want. So if you want to have all uppercase hex colors, then you can do that. And so that will change the format of it. You can also prefix the color with the hashtag, the pound sign. So I'm gonna put that one on as well because in most of the applications I use, it would be beneficial to have that included. And then the next one is use legacy syntax for HSL and RGB. I don't need to do that because I'm just gonna be using the regular way of laying those out if ever I do. But in fact, I'm only really gonna be using the hex codes in any case. The next one is the preferred color format. So out of the different color formats, you can choose a particular preference and you'll see why this is gonna be useful in a moment. But you can just bear in mind here that we can change this one. And then here, you've got the different formats that you want to be shown in this window down here. So you can toggle these on and off and you can see that as I toggle them off, they're just gonna disappear from view. I am gonna leave those all on because if I do have this window open, I think it's useful to be able to see all of those, albeit I'm not probably not gonna open that too much. So I am gonna leave all of those toggled on. Next we're gonna come on to the shortcuts. And here you've got the option to record a shortcut to pick the color. Now I did mention that we have already got a shortcut for pick color, which is command P. But as I mentioned earlier, that only works if the application is actually sort of open on screen rather than just running in the background in the menu bar. Whereas this one is going to allow you to basically pick a color using a global shortcut. So I'm gonna record a shortcut here, which is my handy four finger modifier plus P. I'm not too bothered about that being a little bit tricky to get my fingers over because I'm gonna be triggering this with Stream Deck ultimately. And then you can also record a shortcut to just toggle this window up. I'm not going to do that one for the moment. The next one along is this advanced tab here. And this is the one where we're going to want to tick a couple of boxes. So the first one is show color sampler when opening window. That's an option, you may or may not want that. So when you open the window, do you want it to show the color sampler to begin with? I'm gonna leave that one off. The next one though is copy the color in the preferred format after picking. So that is the one that's gonna enable us to program this in one button with the Stream Deck with a single action because we do already have in our shortcuts section, we've already programmed the pick color. And in fact, let me just show you, I've now got text edit as my active application, but if I just use that shortcut, then you can see that it's triggered the color picker. And so if I come down here, I can pick a color from anywhere on here. Let's pick this gray. And because we've now also, if we come in here, I didn't have it selected, if we select this one copy color in preferred format after picking and then I do that again. So I'm gonna come down here and pick this gray using my color picker like that. It has now copied that hex code to the clipboard in the background as well. So now if I just come in here and just use the regular command V for paste, it's now copied the hex code of that particular gray color there. Then there's another option down here. And so that is the crucial one to have ticked, by the way. There is also an option here, use larger text in text fields. That's basically just gonna change the size of the text in these fields here. I'm all about smallest possible text size. So I'm not gonna toggle that one on. But that now is it. So now basically what I can do is I can close this down and I can close this down, but our color picker is still going to work. So let me just bring something up that's a different color. Let me just bring this red subscribe button. I wonder what color that is. Well now I can use my keyboard shortcut, command shift, option, control P. And I can just pick that red color there. And it has already copied the hex code over. And now if I paste it, that is the color of the red in the YouTube subscribe button. So there's only one step to do now extra. And that is to come over to our stream deck. And I've got a little space here. And all we need to do is use the most basic of stream deck actions, which is in the system group of actions. We're gonna come down here and just grab the hot key. And I'm gonna drag that over to there. And then we're simply just gonna use the hot key that we've programmed, which was in my case, command alt, control, shift, P. And now if I just change the title of that, obviously I will be going in and making a custom icon for this. But for the moment, I'm gonna use English spelling of color, color picker. There we go, so I know what it is. And now if I press that button on my stream deck, what you'll see is it activates that color picker. And so I can go over here, maybe I'll grab this yellow and then I'll just bring my little text file up here, click down here and paste. And that is the color that I'm using for the yellow in those stream deck buttons. And so that is it really, it's as simple as that. You can obviously, if you want to go and program instead of using the hex code colors, you could use the default being for the RGB or whichever color format you prefer. But the process will be the same. You could also assign a keyboard shortcut if you wanted for that one to actually pop up the color picker as well. So that is something that you can do if you wish. So I hope you found that useful. If you did find it useful, then don't forget to go down and hit the like and subscribe button. And obviously if you found it really useful, then you can head over to my Bimeo Coffee page to support me on a one-off basis or on an ongoing basis with a subscription. But apart from that, do also go and check out Eileen's great videos. She's got literally years worth of amazing tutorials. So check out her channel. Link is in the description. And if you're feeling hungry, definitely check out Silver Lining Homeplace with Dina. And link to that is also in the description as well. And thank you, Dina. You've just made my life a lot easier. So it's much appreciated. I will leave a link to some of my other Mac productivity apps over on the right-hand side. And YouTube is gonna pick a great video for you just over on the top as well. So until the next video, have a wonderful day.