Windows only: ColorPad is a lightweight colour picking application. Weighing in at only 148k and fully portable, it’s no burden at all to tuck it in your flash drive toolkit. The default interface is spartan and will appear a bit dated to users that have grown used to some of the flashier graphics in modern operating systems like Vista. Fortunately if the chunky graphics of the default skin bother you, it’s a completely skinnable app. Appearances aside, ColorPad delivers a ton of features in a tiny package. You can grab the colour value of anything you can see on your screen in hex, dec, and floating point number format. ColorPad has a persistent zoom function and a split screen option. There are numerous keyboard shortcuts that cover the basic functions and allow you to do more advanced tweaks like shift the colour once you’ve grabbed it. ColorPad is freeware, Windows only. ColorPad [via Customize.org]
If the digital photo you just uploaded looks washed out on Flickr compared to in your desktop image editor, that’s because Firefox 3′s advanced colour profile support isn’t turned on. To enable it, type about:config in Firefox 3′s address bar, then click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button. Then, in the Filter field, type gfx.color_management.enabled and set that value to true (its default value is false). Restart Firefox. From there on in, your photo colours will be richer than they were. Why isn’t this value true by default? Well, according to Mozilla, you’ll see a 10-15% performance hit using this setting, but if you’ve got a reasonably fast machine, it’ll be worth the better-looking photos. Hit the link below for an extended explanation of Firefox’s colour profile support. Firefox 3: Colour profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors) [dria.org via Joi Ito via Xeni Jardin]
