Colours
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Any program that has a colour picker can do it. In fact there might even be web applications that do it to make it easy but MS paint does it, I just happened to have PS open at the time to do some sketching. So then pick the colour from the image and check what value it is. More advanced programs like photoshop should give it to you in the correct hexidecimal code too (they're all designed to work with web authoring in mind, so will have "web safe" colour options available). But even if you do it with MS Paint it's a fairly trivial conversion process as the apparently random numbers and letters are just Red, Green and Blue values but in hex, so 00 to FF rather than 0 to 255. There are plenty of websites that will do that for you.
Ahh, cool. I want to learn to use even simple "advanced" programs, but the few times i've tried, the layers and the masks and whatever had me in over my head. I simply couldn't make it all play together. I need a "picture editing for dumbies" class to open up.
On account that GIMP is free, albeit frustrating to work with, I recommend DeviantART for tutorials. They're hit-and-miss as all tutorials are, but it's good to have one place you know where to look before starting on Google. If you try to order them by popularity and "all time", it should be easier to find the better ones. Even ones that don't show anything productive are useful just to get you familiar with what tools are where, how they work and what to do with them. If you come across anything over your head just ignore it and press on, it will all slot in place later.
I figured that, as with most things in life, the trick is learning the ideas, concepts and terms - and how to manipulate within that world, then you can more or less work in any program. but first you need to figure out layers and masking, regardless of the program.
I DL'ed (fully legally of course, mr. Watchman) a copy of photoshop in early 2000... and the help was massive even then. but maybe they are more user friendly now.