Gpick vs Leonardo

Gpick is a free, open-source color picker and palette editor for Linux. It samples colors from the desktop, with magnification and keyboard control of the pointer, and can assign names to colors automatically. Palette tools let users build palettes from images, generate schemes, mix colors, adjust lightness or saturation, and create harmonious colors. For noisy or patterned sources, oversampling averages multiple pixel values using five falloff types. Gpick imports and exports Inkscape/GIMP palettes and Adobe Swatch Exchange files; export options also include MTL, CSS, HTML, and customizable text files. HTML exports can be shared as palette previews with people who do not use palette software. A floating mode provides a pointer-following window and notification-area icon for basic picking, but excludes palette editing and color adjustment. Command-line arguments let other programs and scripts use Gpick. Downloads include Debian and Ubuntu packages for amd64 and source archives. The project repository identifies its license as BSD-3-Clause.

Leonardo is an open-source tool for creating, managing, and sharing accessible color systems for interface design and data visualization. Users can generate swatches from target contrast ratios or set target lightness, then adjust brightness, contrast, and saturation with adaptive themes. Sequential and diverging scales support data visualization. Accessibility tools can cycle through colorblind-safe palettes and compare color differences across color vision deficiency types, while charts and 3D models help evaluate themes. Themes and scales can be downloaded as SVG, and scales can also be exported as Tableau XML. Developer output includes parameters for @adobe/leonardo-contrast-colors, CSS custom properties, and design tokens. The related JavaScript package generates adaptive contrast-based colors and is installed with npm; its documentation includes vanilla JavaScript and React examples. The site also documents an MCP server for generating themes, checking contrast, converting colors, and creating palettes. The project is licensed under Apache V2 and has a free plan listed at free. One limitation is that generated contrast ratios can be slightly above requested values because RGB colors and color-space interpolation constrain exact results.