HTML Color Codes and Converting RGB to Hexadecimal

When I redesigned my blog, I wanted my Adsense unit to merge properly with the background of the theme. My earlier theme had white background, so it was never a problem to integrate the ads. The sidebar of my new theme has a unique color and I wanted the background of my Adsense unit to have the same color. Adsense setup has only a small collection of colors (although we can manually enter the colors). I didn’t have Photoshop or a GIMP installed in my system (office computer from where I blog). Now the question is how to get the correct color code when you don’t have any picture editors?

This is pretty simple! I took screen shot of my blog and pasted in paint. Using the color picker, I selected the color of my sidebar. Now paint displays color in RGB format and I wanted it in hexadecimal format. My color was RGB (216, 217, 198). HTML colors codes are made up of 3 sets of hex numbers, one for Red, one for Green, and one for Blue and to get the color code in hexadecimal format is very simple.

Here the calculator that comes with Windows is handy, to convert between Decimal and Hex values. Open the calculator and select View and then Scientific. Once you do this, you’ll see more buttons and controls on the calculator. Click “Dec” and the key in a number (the number that is specific to red). Now click “Hex” and it’ll convert the number to hex. To convert from Hex to Dec, click on “Hex”, key in the number, and then click “Dec”. Sometimes you’ll get a color specification in Decimal, for example (128, 30, 80) and you can use this method to convert it to hex (80, 1E, 50) which would look like this for your HTML color #801E50. (Imp: Don’t key in all the three numbers and convert to hexadecimal, this would give a different combination) The decimal part for a color varies from 0-255 and we can have different combinations by varying this RGB combination.

Here are some of the common colors and their decimal and hexadecimal codes.

000000 is black (0’s for all three colors)
FFFFFF is white (255’s for all three colors)
FF0000 is all RED (255 for Red, 0 green, 0 blue)
00FF00 is all GREEN (0 Red, 255 green, 0 blue)
0000FF is all Blue (0 red, 0 green, 255 blue)
FFFF00 is Yellow (255 red, 255 green, and 0 blue)
808080 is a gray (128 red, 128 green, and 125 blue)

Next time when you face this issue, try our this method. There is a small software (62 kb), Pixie, which will tell you the Hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values of any color.

Technorati tags: HTML Color Codes, RGB,

Nirmal

Nirmal is a Technology Blogger and a Microsoft MVP in Windows. Blogging has been his passion for more than a decade now, he started with this blog in 2007. He can be contacted at nirmal@nirmaltv.com. You can find Nirmal on Google+, Twitter and Facebook.

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