Is there an iPhone app to tell you what color you're looking at?

TidBITS Talk
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Does anybody here know of a simple little app that will let me point my iPhone camera at something and then it will tell me what color I’m looking at? Yup, colorblind. My latest issue is amber vs. green on an old MagSafe plug I started using lately for a rather old MacBook Pro. Often, the green LED is lighter than the amber but on this old thing not even that trick works. My wife’s away on business right now so I have nobody at home to ask. :laughing: No, seriously, I could really use such an app. Any good suggestions?

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I’ve never been color blind, so I can’t make a personal recommendation. But a quick DuckDuckGo brings up this:

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@Simon wondering if the options around the magnifying glass in Control Center would help? The color options involve various settings which map the camera to help display differences.

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For occasional use try the Digital Color Meter app included with MacOS. Take a picture with the iPhone and then on the Mac use the app to examine the colors.

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Sorry to digress a little … I don’t have a solution but it’s actually a more fundamental problem because color perception is so subjective. I have been looking for apps (either iOS or macOS) that can give me an objective reading of a color, e.g. for a bunch of pixels on a picture (ok, let’s ignore this is not really objective because of different lighting etc.). Needs to be efficient enough to look at hundreds of small areas on a screen AND record some color values. Suggestions welcome! Thanks.

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Color Blind Pal is an iMore recommendation, and it’s free:

There’s a also long list of iOS apps useful for blind and low vision users:

https://www.applevis.com/apps/ios/apps-for-blind-or-low-vision-users

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Color Blind Pal has awful usability, I was hoping another person here with 1st hand experience would have a better suggestion.

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I was quite impressed with a quick trial of Color Name AR.

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Thanks to your comment, I dived into the App Store and found 3 similar apps. I think Color Name * (the one with a big asterisk as its icon) is even better than Color Name AR. And it’s free without any nagging.

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Thanks. I agree about ColorName*. I’m still not really impressed with the ability of either of those apps to recognise some colours, but I guess that’s down to the camera on my iPhone 13 mini. In good natural light I’m looking at a Post-It that is distinctly yellow, but the camera shows it as more or less white, and the apps respond accordingly. A pity, because I argue with my wife about colours, and questions like “yellow or cream?” are typical. I guess there’s a good reason why proper colour analysis equipment is expensive.

@Simon I’m sorry we may have hijacked your thread. ColorName* says the colours of the charging light on my ancient MacBook Pro are Atomic Tangerine and Electric Green, so this approach works, but it sure is fiddly. I hope you might have found a better one. For this specific issue, I wonder if you could use Shortcuts – which can detect battery status – to send you a notification when charging finishes?

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The use case is here is a closed and/or shut off old MacBook. There’s only the MagSafe LED light to tell charging status.

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:Temperature-sensitive sticker on the charger?

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I can’t answer Simon’s question directly regarding a good quality color-divining app for his MagSafe plug, but I can tell you what I do. I’m concerned about leaving my Mac charging for overly long periods (that may be Simon’s motivation for this question) so my own solution has been to get a smart plug and then set a routine in Home to have it turn off again after 2 hours. Is that optimal? No. But it seems to be enough to get me to 100%, so it suffices.