Choosing the exact shade of a color is very difficult to do using a color wheel or "rainbow" color square.

ColorShades is designed to help you choose colors by looking at grids of related colors. You set the center color of a grid using the intuitive Hue-Saturation-Brightness model. You then pick which two out of Hue, Saturation, and Brightness that you want to vary across the grid, set the step sizes and ColorShades fills in the grid.

You can drag a color chip from any of the color rectangles in the grid and drop it anywhere on any application or color well that accepts color drags. You can also drag a color chip into the center rectangle of the grid to reset the center color.

Pausing the mouse for a few seconds over one of the color chips brings up a tool tip that shows the color coordinates (in HSB, RGB and a hex string representation of the RGB values) of the color under the mouse.

Control-Clicking (Right Clicking) on a color chip loads the hex string corresponding to the chip’s color into the system clipboard. You can then paste the hex string into a web page builder or other app.

You can also add text representing the HSB or RGB color coordinates using the items under the Chip Appearance menu.

You can use ColorShades to get your desired colors on a printout. Using the on-screen controls, set the center colors to be as close as you can to your desired colors.Examine your printouts to find the exact shade that you want and then look up the corresponding color components on ColorShades (or read them right off the printout if you have the chip text turned on for the print). Finally, enter the color components in your graphics program or drag the corresponding chip from ColorShades to your graphics program.