Hex Scan vs Spectra

A minimalist design utility that gives you the hex code of any color you point your camera at.

Point at anything. The color is on your clipboard in three seconds. Spectra is a native color picker built for designers and developers who pick colors dozens of times a day and can't afford a tool that slows them down. It opens directly to the live camera, locks the crosshair on the first tap, and lets you copy the value in any format before the thought has finished forming. No account. No ads. No subscription. Your data stays private — on your device, syncing only through your own iCloud. -- CAPTURE FROM THE REAL WORLD -- Aim the live camera at any surface. The crosshair samples an averaged region around the center and updates HEX, RGB, HSL, and HSB in real time. Tap to lock, tap the value to copy. Three seconds from cold launch to clipboard. Need more precision? Pinch to zoom on the camera feed. The crosshair repositions freely so you never miss the exact shade. -- PULL A PALETTE FROM A PHOTO -- Open any image from your library. The dominant-color extractor surfaces up to six colors from the image using on-device Vision. Tap individual pixels for exact samples with pinch-zoom. Save the whole palette in a tap. -- EVERY FORMAT YOU WORK IN -- Free: HEX, RGB, HSL, HSB, SwiftUI Color, UIKit UIColor, CSS. Pro: CMYK, LAB, LCH, Tailwind config token, SVG, JSON, SwiftUI Color Set, and Xcode Asset Catalog — all in one tap. The on-screen color wheel and channel sliders let you build from scratch. Paste a HEX value and Spectra parses it instantly. -- HARMONY AND CONTRAST (PRO) -- Generate six harmony schemes from any base color: complementary, split-complementary, triadic, tetradic, analogous, and monochromatic. Check contrast between any two colors against WCAG 2.1 and APCA. The one-tap fix nudges your foreground or background to the nearest passing ratio so you don't have to guess. -- PALETTES AND SYNC -- Save and organize colors into named palettes. Drag to reorder. The free tier holds three palettes. Pro removes the cap. iCloud sync keeps every palette current across iPhone, iPad, and Mac automatically — no setup, no server, just your own iCloud. -- SYSTEM INTEGRATION -- Widgets (Pro): put a palette on your Home Screen or Lock Screen so your working colors are always one glance away. Share Extension: pull a color directly from an image shared from Safari, Photos, or any other app. No context switching. macOS System Picker: the system-wide screen crosshair grabs any pixel from any app on your Mac and lands it in the same synced library. App Clip: when a friend shares a Color Card, viewers tap the link and see the exact palette in a lightweight instant experience — no full install required to feel the value. -- SHARE WHAT YOU SEE -- Color Cards: export any color or palette as a polished image in 9:16 or 1:1, with clean swatches and HEX labels, ready to post without touching another app. Capture Replay: after picking from the live camera, Spectra saves a short 3–6 second clip of the scene resolving into its palette. It exports ready to post and doubles as a product demo to anyone who sees it. Trend templates in the share sheet: "Palette of my day," "Color of [place]," and "Album palette" match formats already spreading on short-form social. Sharing is always optional and never gates the core utility. -- PRIVACY BY DESIGN -- Camera and photo access happen on-device at the moment you use them. Nothing is uploaded. No analytics SDK. No third-party trackers. No account. The privacy label is small because the product earned it. -- FREE AND PRO -- The free tier is genuinely useful: camera capture, photo sampling, the on-screen picker, HEX through HSB, SwiftUI and CSS export, Color Cards, iCloud sync, the macOS system picker, and up to three palettes. Spectra Pro is a one-time purchase. It unlocks the full format set, harmony generation, contrast checker with one-tap fix, advanced exports, unlimited palettes, and widgets. No subscription, no recurring charge, restores across all your Apple devices.