What Color Is This

Detect colors with their names, from general to very specific; save them, organize swatches, get accessibility palettes, and share photos to pull colors directly.

"What color is this?"

It's the question everyone asks me when they find out I'm colorblind. So I built an app that answers it.

Point your camera at anything (a dress, a paint swatch, a flower, your kid's drawing) and What Color Is This? names the color instantly. It matches against 30,000 named colors using CIEDE2000 perceptual distance, the same color-difference formula used in industrial color matching. Results correspond to how humans actually see color, not just how computers store it.

Every color is identified in three layers:

• Broad family: blue, red, green, teal
• Qualified descriptor: light muted blue, vivid orange
• Closest named color from 30,000 options: Tiffany Blue, Burnt Sienna, Jedi Night, Piano Black

WHAT IT DOES

• Camera identification with 7×7 pixel averaging for accuracy
• White balance calibration to compensate for warm or cold lighting
• Upload any photo and tap to sample colors anywhere in the image
• Share Sheet integration: send any image from any app to identify a color
• Color picker action extension for designers
• Matching palettes: complementary, analogous, triadic, split-complementary
• Accessible color palettes based on Bang Wong's 2011 research
• Color vision simulation: see how a color appears to people with protanopia, deuteranopia, or tritanopia
• Set your own vision type for personalized accessible-palette suggestions
• Save colors with personal labels ("Sarah's favorite", "kitchen paint", "my hex value")
• Export your color library as JSON
• Random color explorer: discover the 30,000 named colors one tap at a time
• Works completely offline after first launch. No internet required.

BUILT FOR COLORBLINDNESS, USEFUL FOR EVERYONE

Designers picking palettes. Artists matching paint to a reference. Shoppers checking if "navy" really is navy. Students learning color theory. Accessibility researchers auditing UI. Anyone who's ever pointed at something and wondered what color it actually is.

PRIVACY

No accounts. No tracking. No data collection. No ads.

Your saved colors live in local storage on your device. Camera frames are processed in memory and never uploaded. The 30,000-color database is bundled in the app, so there are no network calls during identification.

ABOUT THE NAMING

The named-color database is the open-source color-names dataset by David Aerne, MIT licensed. Visible attribution lives inside the app under Settings → Open-Source Licenses, and as a credit on the in-app Info tray for every identified color.

ABOUT THE COLOR SCIENCE

CIEDE2000 distance: Sharma, Wu, & Dalal (2005) Color vision simulation: Brettel, Viénot, & Mollon (1997) Accessible-palette colors: Bang Wong (2011)

A companion 14-plate color vision screening tool (also free, no signup) lives at whatcoloristhis.one/test/