Colours are everywhere, and they’re complex. While some people may be able to correctly identify a shade of red as scarlet, crimson, burgundy or cherry, when they’re presented with something really obscure, they’re going to need some expert input. That’s where colour-picker app Litur, created by Nigerian developer Bezaleel Reuben Ashefor, comes in.

The app is designed to help people correctly identify the colours they see around them and covers a multitude of needs – it’s as suitable for professionals working on a project as it is for homeowners searching for the perfect colour to paint their bathroom walls.

Explore some of Litur’s key features below.

Litur has a vast store of colours and palette combinations, and identifying hues is a doddle. See a colour you like in the real world? Open the app and point your camera towards it – Litur identifies the colour, which you can then save. You can also pick colours from images in your Camera Roll.

When Litur has identified your colour, it shows you the colour codes for RGB, HSB and CMYK – tap on each code to copy it – as well as relevant colour combinations.

Litur also supports multitasking on iPad, so you can easily drag and drop colours from the app into other applications.

Litur’s extensive colour library opens up endless possibilities; take the colour red – for every shade, you get entirely different combinations of colours. “There are no limits. Even the generated colour combinations of the colours you collect can sit at more than a billion,” says Ashefor.

You can save a colour or palette as an image to your Photos app and share it, and everything syncs across devices. “Litur saves your colours across all your devices using CloudKit, so you never have to worry about losing a device on which you captured a colour,” Ashefor says.

The Contrast Checker is a pro tool that can help users get even more from the colours they’re exploring (you’ll find it at the top of the screen when you tap into a colour). This feature identifies the contrast ratio of two colours based on the WCAG 2.0 level specification. “It’s useful to see how a text in a particular colour would contrast against a background with another colour,” Ashefor explains.

To complement his mobile colour-picker app, Ashefor created Litur - Organize your colors for Mac, which simplifies the workflow for users. Thanks to everything syncing across devices, you can be on the go with the mobile app, and when you get back to your desktop, the colours you’ve saved are ready to work with.

“Those colours are right there waiting for you to use in Sketch, Figma, Illustrator or any other tool you choose,” Ashefor says, “and you can do this without having to look through your phone for the hex codes of each colour you captured.”

Picking colours from the real and digital worlds for your growing colour library is a cinch with Litur – now it’s your job to get creative with what you’ve discovered.