I’m having problems with my color picker in photoshop CS5
Image 1: I select the black [ish] bar. Color picker returns gray.
Image 2: I select the white [ish] background below the black bar, color picker returns lighter gray.
Now I thought the color picker was using grayscale, so to test, I did the same with blue.
Image 3: I select the blue, color picker returns wrong blue.
Image 4: I select the blue color one pixel higher than in image 3, color picker returns an even lighter blue. It’s still the wrong blue, and the blue in image 3 and 4 is a solid color.
Note: there are no layer styles present!
Answer
Its because the colour picker is sampling a larger area than one pixel, and is mixing the colours.
To fix this, when the eye dropper is selected, change the sample size at the top to Point Sample
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : AlexMorley-Finch , Answer Author : JohnB