Artists and designers will love the Color Query Pro app. In fact, anyone who has ever seen a color that captures their attention and they just have to have it, should have this app. It takes images and dissects them into their color language equivalent, think Pantone colors, providing users with numeric values, color families and sibling colors that are similar to the one you’ve chosen.

An app like this is a godsend for graphic artists, designers, painters and just about anyone who has to get color right. But, this app is not just for professionals. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a great tool for those of us who want to capture just the right color for a pillow that you need on that special sofa you just purchased, or to find the right set of curtains to complement the fabulous paint job you just had done in your house. Whatever the situation, Color Query Pro can help.

For a small fee, you get the equivalent of a paint sample lab in your pocket. With this app you can snap a shot of just about anything and the app will go to work to digest it and disseminate its component colors to provide you with it’s color coding and color naming equivalent in a myriad of color schemes, Pantone being just one of them.

Some systems used to represent the color in the clearest way possible for the best reproduction possible include:

• RGB – the broadly used system for representing colors on a computer screen. R is for Red, G is for Green and B is for Blue.
• CMYK – this is the model for color printing. C is for Cyan, M is for Magenta, Y is for Yellow and K is for Key. The Key is the recipe for creating the final color from CMY.
• HSB – represents hue saturation and brightness and is device independent system.
• HEX – 6 digit hexadecimal number that represents a color code. The code represents the intensity of red, green and blue to create the final color.

After you take a photo of the item that has the color you want to capture and know more about, you can even tinker around with the color attributes that the app has come up with. This allows you see small variations and even save them for future use. You may have loved a color you saw on someone’s wall, but you might love even more your own take on it. You can take and save up to 25 samples, which is quite a bit for any artist.

The app store’s color parameters and names in a variety of palettes. Some of the more well-known ones include Sherwin-Williams, Pantone, BEHR, and Valspar. It also knows colors in Resene, Colors of Japan, Federal Standard 595 systems and more. Color Query Pro’s information page lists many of them.

I would love to be able to print the color so I can see it in real life and even hand it out if necessary. Even better would be the ability to capture that color and share it through messaging.

Color Query Pro is a powerhouse app for anyone who thinks in color and desires to capture the right one at the right time.