Pastel is a new iOS app from Steven Troughton-Smith that makes working with colors easy. The app comes with some pre-loaded collections, but it’s easy to make your own. I took some time to enter the colors for all of our podcasts over on Relay FM, and also made a collection of colors I use here on 512 Pixels:
This makes grabbing the value for any of these colors super easy. To my shame, I was just keeping the hex values in Apple Notes until this app came along.
While I added these colors manually, Pastel has some neat tricks up its sleeve for collecting color information. It can be used to sample images from Photos or Files manually, but the app can also analyze images and pick out the dominant colors itself.
You can copy out RGB and hex codes, but also codes to use in Objective-C, Swift and SwiftUI. If you’re working on an app, this is a great tool to keep up with these assets. You can also drag and drop colors from Pastel into other apps that support it, like Mindnode or the iWork apps.
Collections can even be used to create custom Apple Watch faces, which is a cool bonus.
Pastel syncs your library via iCloud, and there’s a Mac app coming soon. It’s free to download and use with up to 20 palettes; to unlock more there is an one-time in-app purchase of $4.99.