ColorPicker4Hue

You want to match the color of your hue lights to the color of your curtains, your carpet, or even your coffee cups? This app will let you do that. Just use your iPhone camera to point at ordinary objects and ‘click’: your lights will be set to the captured color. It’s that easy!

With the lights set to a certain color, you can use brightness- and saturation sliders to tweak your light settings to get them just right.

First use

Before you can start capturing colors, you need to set up your hue bridge. By now, you are probably familiar with that process, so make sure that you are on the WiFi network that can find your bridge, tap “Add hue bridge” and follow the instructions. Press the “push link” button on the bridge and confirm. That’s all! You’ll see the camera screen with the brightness- and saturation sliders and a live video image. There is a little marker in the center of the image and the entire screen background changes to the center color as you move your iPhone around. Tap on the shutter and all your lights are set to that color!

Daily use

Every time you launch the app, it immediately shows the camera screen, so you can start capturing colors right away. Point and click. You can then change the brightness and saturation as required. Brightness changes the amount of light and saturation changes the amount of white light that is mixed with the selected color. (That’s how you get those pastel colours!) You’ll see the effect on the lights. The gradients in the sliders illustrate what happens.
If you want to make a change in the set of lights that are used, just swipe and make the changes. Then swipe back to the camera screen.
The app also remembers the ‘last used’ color (even from a previous session), so if there are other lights that you want to set to that exact same color, just select those lights and tap the colored area beneath the camera image. Pro-tip: if you are not at home and see a nice color somewhere, just capture it. When at home, recall this ‘last used’ color.

Light selection

Of course, you can select for yourself exactly which lights you want to use. Your lights list can be filtered by selecting rooms and/or zones. And you can quickly swipe between the camera screen and the lights list at any time when you want to change your light selection.

The app remembers the last set of lights that you used and it will use that set again the next time, until you change it.

Multiple bridges

If you have more than one bridge (either in your home or maybe also one in your beach house): we’ve got you covered. You can search for more (or other) bridges on your WiFi network and include them in the app. Then just select the required bridge from the list. Obviously, when you switch to another bridge, the app remembers which lights you used the last time you used that bridge. Duh.

Privacy

The ColorPicker4Hue app does not collect any data. The app asks permission to use the camera and then only uses the camera’s video stream to sample one (1) pixel from the center of the stream’s images. The app does not store, process, transfer, analyze or otherwise use the captured images, other than to obtain the color of the one pixel. All images are discarded immediately.

You can revoke your permission to use the camera at all times in the iOS Settings app. There is a button in the privacy section that gets you there. (The app is pretty useless if you do that, but hey, if that’s what you want… )

Privacy statement

Acknowledgements