Spliting bytes

[aamir121a]

I am currently working with win32 API , for image processing, one of the windows function returns RGBA ( colors ) as unsigned int , I then split it into individual bytes by creating a union ,

union colour
{
 unsigned int value;
 unsigned char RGBA[4];
}

to spit the int into individual bytes , my Question is there a better or my convenient way of doing this .