Have I got a cool tool for all you PowerPoint users out there! This one comes from Chris Hanscom, a fellow Microsoft MVP. The tool is “Whats its color,” And it is just what you need for figuring out what colors are in an image and what colors best coordinate with that image.

The site is easy to use. You provide an image, either from your computer or from the Web, and it creates a larger copy and processes it to determine what colors are in the picture. I did a few tests and was really impressed with the output.

The first test I did was on a picture I took long ago in the Detroit airport.

This one was on my hard drive, so I used the browse option on the page to grab the picture. Once you have provided the link or location for the picture, you choose whether you want a small or medium version of the picture and whether you want the background processed or not. For this first test, I picked a medium result and did not discard the background. Click the Upload and Process button and away it goes. The result?

It did a very good job of identifying the major blues in the picture and giving a nice complementary color suggestion. You can use the results to build PPT presentation templates and backgrounds around your pictures by entering the color numbers into the color picker.

My second test was an image from the Web. I used the a picture that I took in Hawaii that I have on Photrade.com.:

The result?

In this case, the processor picked up that the light brown was the dominant color since it makes up the majority of the stone in the background. I like the complimentary color choice for this one much better than the blue one.

If you are going to process a picture with a black or white background, you can omit the background from the processing. The site says that tends to give better results from the color matching. For this test, I used a picture I had taken of some fireworks. I couldn’t see much difference between the two sets of results, but that may have been because of the picture I choose.

The only test that failed while I was working with my pictures was the one I did on a png file. It didn’t like it. I re-saved the file as a jpg and it worked just fine.

In general: A very useful tool. I would say well worth checking out.

Much thanks to Kathleen Anderson (my favorite spiderwebwoman) for pointing the tool out to me. She found out about it via LifeHacker. And if you aren’t checking out LifeHacker and Kathleen’s site, you should be!