To choose a color from a picture in Procreate, insert the photo (Actions > Add > Insert a photo), then touch and hold on the spot you want to sample. A ring appears with the new color on top and your current color on the bottom, and releasing your finger makes it the active color. If the image is in the Reference companion instead of on the canvas, touch and hold on the reference image in the same way.

The Fast Method: Touch and Hold

1. Open your canvas and tap the wrench icon.
2. Go to Add and choose Insert a photo (or paste an image) so the picture sits on its own layer.
3. Touch and hold on the area you want to sample.
4. A ring appears under your finger. The top half previews the color under the cursor, and the bottom half shows the color you already had active.
5. Drag to scrub across the image and watch the preview change.
6. Lift your finger to lock in the color. It now shows in the Color Panel disc at the top right and is ready for any brush.

Procreate has no dedicated eyedropper tool in the toolbar. The picker is a gesture, which is why many people think the feature is missing. Because the ring shows the previous color beside the new one, you can judge a sample against your last pick before committing.

Set Up the Eyedropper Gesture

If touch and hold feels slow or never triggers, check your gesture settings:

1. Tap the wrench icon, then Preferences.
2. Open Gesture Controls.
3. Find Eyedropper.
4. Choose how you want to trigger it: touch and hold, a Quick Menu shortcut, or another available option.

Touch and hold is the least intrusive choice for most people, since it needs no extra button press while you paint. If you map the eyedropper to a Quick Menu or other shortcut, remember that setting applies to your canvas picking only. It does not change how the Reference companion works (more on that below).

You can also adjust the touch-and-hold delay in the same settings area if you want it quicker, but only for the canvas eyedropper.

Sampling From a Photo on the Canvas vs. the Reference Companion

There are two places a picture can live in Procreate, and the sampling behaves a little differently in each.

Image on a canvas layer

When the photo is a layer in your document, the eyedropper reads what is visible on the canvas. That means anything stacked above the photo, such as sketch lines, adjustment layers, or semi-transparent paint, can affect the sampled value. If your picks look slightly off, hide the layers above the photo or sample before you start painting.

This approach is best when you are painting directly over or alongside the photo, or when you want to apply adjustments (blur, noise reduction, color balance) to the picture before sampling it.

Image in the Reference companion

Open Canvas > Reference, switch to the Image tab, and import your picture. The reference sits in a floating window, so it never touches your layers or export. You can still sample from it: touch and hold on the reference image and the same picker ring appears.

Two details that trip people up:

• The hold duration on the reference picker is fixed. It can feel longer than your canvas eyedropper, so give it a beat before you assume it failed.
• It works even when your canvas eyedropper is mapped to something else, such as a Quick Menu shortcut. The reference window ignores that mapping.

The reference approach is cleaner for palette work because the picture never ends up in the file by accident.

Build a Palette From a Picture

Sampling one color at a time is fine for painting, but for design work you often want a set of swatches pulled from an image at once.

1. Open the Color Panel and switch to the Palettes tab.
2. Tap the + button to create a new palette.
3. Choose the option to create one from a photo (or from the camera or a file). Procreate analyzes the image and generates a swatch set.
4. Rename the palette so you can find it later.

Auto-generated palettes are a starting point. They tend to pick up the dominant tones, so they can miss a small but important accent such as a rim light, a logo color, or a sky glow. Use the touch-and-hold picker to add those manually, then save each one into your palette by tapping an empty swatch slot.

Two other tools help while you work:

• Color History keeps your last ten colors, which is handy for backtracking if you sampled the wrong shade. It appears on the Disc, Classic, Harmony, and Value tabs, and in the Color Companion.
• Harmony suggests related colors based on the shade you just sampled. This is useful when a picture gives you one strong hue and you need supporting colors that sit well with it.

Get Accurate Values, Not Just Close Ones

For casual illustration, eyeballing is fine. For production work, where a hex code will be handed to an After Effects comp or a brand guide, a few habits matter.

Avoid noisy single-pixel picks

Photos carry grain, compression artifacts, and sensor noise. Sampling one spot can return a color that is slightly greener or darker than the area looks overall. To get a representative value, duplicate the photo layer, apply a Gaussian Blur at a modest amount, and sample from the blurred copy. Delete the copy afterward.

Read the numbers

Switch to the Value tab in the Color Panel. It offers precision sliders along with numerical and hexadecimal readouts. Once you sample a color, you can read the hex directly and carry it into other apps.

Watch your color profile

Procreate canvases carry a color profile, and the same hex can look different depending on the space it is interpreted in. If your final work lives in an sRGB After Effects project, check your canvas profile under Canvas > Canvas information and make sure it matches what you are delivering into. Otherwise, a color you sampled and a color you typed into a comp can look subtly different even though the numbers match. If you are working in a wide-gamut or ACES-managed pipeline, treat Procreate values as approximate and verify them against your reference in the compositing app.

Troubleshooting

The ring never appears. Hold your finger still for a moment instead of tapping. Check that nothing is blocking the gesture, such as a tool or mode that consumes touch input, and that your eyedropper trigger is set the way you expect in Gesture Controls.

It works on the canvas but not on the reference. The reference uses its own fixed hold time. Press and hold slightly longer, and keep your finger steady.

The sampled color looks wrong. Look for layers above the photo, blend modes, or reduced layer opacity. These change what the eyedropper reads from the visible canvas.

You want brushes to pick up the photo's colors automatically. Procreate's eyedropper doesn't do that on its own. A common workaround is to paint on the same layer as the photo with a smudge-style brush, which moves the existing colors around instead of sampling them. Another option is to sample manually as you go with the touch-and-hold gesture.

Carry the Colors Into Your Motion Pipeline

For motion designers, animators, and compositors, Procreate is often where a palette or style frame gets worked out before the real production begins. A sensible handoff looks like this:

1. Sample key colors from your reference picture and save them to a named palette.
2. Note the hex values from the Value tab for primaries, accents, and neutrals.
3. Recreate the swatches in After Effects (or Cinema 4D, Blender, or Nuke) as solids, color controls, or material inputs, and confirm they match visually against the original picture.
4. Export your Procreate style frame as a PNG so it sits in the comp as a visual reference layer you can eyedrop against.

Sampling hex values only captures color, though, not how a look behaves across a shot, such as contrast, texture, and edge treatment. This is where Styleframe can fit beside the Procreate step. It is an AI video and motion tool, and you can use the picture or style frame you built in Procreate as a reference image.

Treat that as a complement to your color work, not a replacement for it. You still decide on the hex values, check them against your pipeline's color space, and do the final grade in your compositing app.

Quick Recap

• Touch and hold on a picture to pick a color. The ring previews the new color above your current one.
• The picture can be a canvas layer or an image in Canvas > Reference. The reference uses its own fixed hold time.
• Use Palettes to generate swatches from a photo, then refine them by hand.
• Blur a duplicate layer to avoid grain-driven picks, and read hex values on the Value tab.
• Check the canvas color profile before moving values into After Effects or other tools.

Once you have the gesture down, color picking in Procreate takes a second or two, and a short palette-building pass can save you rework when those colors reach your comp.

To choose a color from a picture in Procreate, insert the photo (Actions > Add > Insert a photo), then touch and hold on the spot you want to sample. A ring appears with the new color on top and your current color on the bottom, and releasing your finger makes it the active color. If the image is in the Reference companion instead of on the canvas, touch and hold on the reference image in the same way.

The Fast Method: Touch and Hold

1. Open your canvas and tap the wrench icon.
2. Go to Add and choose Insert a photo (or paste an image) so the picture sits on its own layer.
3. Touch and hold on the area you want to sample.
4. A ring appears under your finger. The top half previews the color under the cursor, and the bottom half shows the color you already had active.
5. Drag to scrub across the image and watch the preview change.
6. Lift your finger to lock in the color. It now shows in the Color Panel disc at the top right and is ready for any brush.

Procreate has no dedicated eyedropper tool in the toolbar. The picker is a gesture, which is why many people think the feature is missing. Because the ring shows the previous color beside the new one, you can judge a sample against your last pick before committing.

Set Up the Eyedropper Gesture

If touch and hold feels slow or never triggers, check your gesture settings:

1. Tap the wrench icon, then Preferences.
2. Open Gesture Controls.
3. Find Eyedropper.
4. Choose how you want to trigger it: touch and hold, a Quick Menu shortcut, or another available option.

Touch and hold is the least intrusive choice for most people, since it needs no extra button press while you paint. If you map the eyedropper to a Quick Menu or other shortcut, remember that setting applies to your canvas picking only. It does not change how the Reference companion works (more on that below).

You can also adjust the touch-and-hold delay in the same settings area if you want it quicker, but only for the canvas eyedropper.

Sampling From a Photo on the Canvas vs. the Reference Companion

There are two places a picture can live in Procreate, and the sampling behaves a little differently in each.

Image on a canvas layer

When the photo is a layer in your document, the eyedropper reads what is visible on the canvas. That means anything stacked above the photo, such as sketch lines, adjustment layers, or semi-transparent paint, can affect the sampled value. If your picks look slightly off, hide the layers above the photo or sample before you start painting.

This approach is best when you are painting directly over or alongside the photo, or when you want to apply adjustments (blur, noise reduction, color balance) to the picture before sampling it.

Image in the Reference companion

Open Canvas > Reference, switch to the Image tab, and import your picture. The reference sits in a floating window, so it never touches your layers or export. You can still sample from it: touch and hold on the reference image and the same picker ring appears.

Two details that trip people up:

• The hold duration on the reference picker is fixed. It can feel longer than your canvas eyedropper, so give it a beat before you assume it failed.
• It works even when your canvas eyedropper is mapped to something else, such as a Quick Menu shortcut. The reference window ignores that mapping.

The reference approach is cleaner for palette work because the picture never ends up in the file by accident.

Build a Palette From a Picture

Sampling one color at a time is fine for painting, but for design work you often want a set of swatches pulled from an image at once.

1. Open the Color Panel and switch to the Palettes tab.
2. Tap the + button to create a new palette.
3. Choose the option to create one from a photo (or from the camera or a file). Procreate analyzes the image and generates a swatch set.
4. Rename the palette so you can find it later.

Auto-generated palettes are a starting point. They tend to pick up the dominant tones, so they can miss a small but important accent such as a rim light, a logo color, or a sky glow. Use the touch-and-hold picker to add those manually, then save each one into your palette by tapping an empty swatch slot.

Two other tools help while you work:

• Color History keeps your last ten colors, which is handy for backtracking if you sampled the wrong shade. It appears on the Disc, Classic, Harmony, and Value tabs, and in the Color Companion.
• Harmony suggests related colors based on the shade you just sampled. This is useful when a picture gives you one strong hue and you need supporting colors that sit well with it.

Get Accurate Values, Not Just Close Ones

For casual illustration, eyeballing is fine. For production work, where a hex code will be handed to an After Effects comp or a brand guide, a few habits matter.

Avoid noisy single-pixel picks

Photos carry grain, compression artifacts, and sensor noise. Sampling one spot can return a color that is slightly greener or darker than the area looks overall. To get a representative value, duplicate the photo layer, apply a Gaussian Blur at a modest amount, and sample from the blurred copy. Delete the copy afterward.

Read the numbers

Switch to the Value tab in the Color Panel. It offers precision sliders along with numerical and hexadecimal readouts. Once you sample a color, you can read the hex directly and carry it into other apps.

Watch your color profile

Procreate canvases carry a color profile, and the same hex can look different depending on the space it is interpreted in. If your final work lives in an sRGB After Effects project, check your canvas profile under Canvas > Canvas information and make sure it matches what you are delivering into. Otherwise, a color you sampled and a color you typed into a comp can look subtly different even though the numbers match. If you are working in a wide-gamut or ACES-managed pipeline, treat Procreate values as approximate and verify them against your reference in the compositing app.

Troubleshooting

The ring never appears. Hold your finger still for a moment instead of tapping. Check that nothing is blocking the gesture, such as a tool or mode that consumes touch input, and that your eyedropper trigger is set the way you expect in Gesture Controls.

It works on the canvas but not on the reference. The reference uses its own fixed hold time. Press and hold slightly longer, and keep your finger steady.

The sampled color looks wrong. Look for layers above the photo, blend modes, or reduced layer opacity. These change what the eyedropper reads from the visible canvas.

You want brushes to pick up the photo's colors automatically. Procreate's eyedropper doesn't do that on its own. A common workaround is to paint on the same layer as the photo with a smudge-style brush, which moves the existing colors around instead of sampling them. Another option is to sample manually as you go with the touch-and-hold gesture.

Carry the Colors Into Your Motion Pipeline

For motion designers, animators, and compositors, Procreate is often where a palette or style frame gets worked out before the real production begins. A sensible handoff looks like this:

1. Sample key colors from your reference picture and save them to a named palette.
2. Note the hex values from the Value tab for primaries, accents, and neutrals.
3. Recreate the swatches in After Effects (or Cinema 4D, Blender, or Nuke) as solids, color controls, or material inputs, and confirm they match visually against the original picture.
4. Export your Procreate style frame as a PNG so it sits in the comp as a visual reference layer you can eyedrop against.

Sampling hex values only captures color, though, not how a look behaves across a shot, such as contrast, texture, and edge treatment. This is where Styleframe can fit beside the Procreate step. It is an AI video and motion tool, and you can use the picture or style frame you built in Procreate as a reference image.

Treat that as a complement to your color work, not a replacement for it. You still decide on the hex values, check them against your pipeline's color space, and do the final grade in your compositing app.

Quick Recap

• Touch and hold on a picture to pick a color. The ring previews the new color above your current one.
• The picture can be a canvas layer or an image in Canvas > Reference. The reference uses its own fixed hold time.
• Use Palettes to generate swatches from a photo, then refine them by hand.
• Blur a duplicate layer to avoid grain-driven picks, and read hex values on the Value tab.
• Check the canvas color profile before moving values into After Effects or other tools.

Once you have the gesture down, color picking in Procreate takes a second or two, and a short palette-building pass can save you rework when those colors reach your comp.