A quick tip for any Photoshop users out there that I only discovered quite recently.  If you are a web designer or developer you fairly regularly wish to get colour values from photos or other websites on the internet. This can sometimes be a pain and I have many times found myself taking a screen shot of a webpage, pasting it into Photoshop and using the colour picker to get the values I was looking for.

There is a little known feature in Photoshop CS3 (it may be in other versions) where you can select colours from outside the document window. To do this is pretty simple....

First select the Eyedropper tool (press i)

You can set up Photoshop and whatever you wish to take a colour sample from, side by side.

In the photoshop document click and hold the mouse button.

If you now drag outside of photoshop it will get the colour value of whatever you hover over.  Simply let go of the mouse button to select the colour, et voila.

A quick and simple tip but saves a lot of time fannying about.