Color Palette Extractor
100% private — runs on your device, never uploaded. Works offline once loaded.
Pull a colour palette out of any image as HEX codes you can copy. You get two palettes: the dominant colours that cover the most area, plus the vivid accent colours — the bright reds, oranges and yellows that make a design pop, even when they only take up a small part of the picture. Great for designers and branding. Everything runs locally in your browser — no uploads.
How a handful of colours get pulled from thousands
A typical photo contains tens of thousands of distinct pixel colours once you account for lighting, shadows and compression noise. To turn that into a usable palette, the tool samples pixels across the image and groups visually similar colours together — clustering, say, forty shades of a similar blue sky into one representative swatch — then ranks those clusters by how much of the image they cover. The most dominant clusters become your palette, so a portrait with a blurred green background will surface that green as a swatch even though no single pixel is repeated identically thousands of times.
Where a palette extractor earns its keep
Designers use it to reverse-engineer a colour scheme from inspiration photography — pulling five swatches from a sunset photo to build a warm UI theme, or from a product shot to match packaging colours in a slide deck. It's also handy for brand consistency: if you have a logo or hero photo but not the original design file, extracting its dominant HEX codes lets you set matching CSS variables without eyeballing it in an image editor.
- Building a colour scheme for a website or app from a mood-board photo
- Pulling packaging or product-shot colours into a slide deck or style guide
- Checking whether a photo's colours clash with an existing brand palette
Reading the order of the results
Swatches are returned ordered by dominance, so the first one or two are usually the background or largest area of the photo, not necessarily the 'important' colour to a human eye — a portrait photo might return a wall colour before the subject's shirt. If the image is mostly one flat colour (a plain background, a solid logo), you may get fewer than the maximum number of swatches because there simply aren't enough distinct colour clusters to fill them.
Getting a cleaner palette
Cropping out a large plain background or border before extracting will stop it from dominating the results and pushing out more interesting colours from the subject. If you're chasing a specific brand colour, cross-check the extracted HEX against the source rather than assuming it's pixel-perfect — JPEG compression can shift subtle tones by a few points.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between dominant and accent colours?
Dominant colours are the ones covering the most area — often backgrounds and large shapes. Accent colours are the most vivid, saturated highlights, spread across the colour wheel, so small but striking reds, oranges and yellows are included instead of being drowned out by a large dull area.
Why were the bright colours in my image missing before?
A plain dominant-colour extractor ranks colours purely by how much area they cover, so a small vivid accent loses to several shades of a background colour. The accent palette fixes this by ranking on colourfulness rather than area.
How many colours do I get?
Up to six dominant colours and up to six accent colours. Grayscale or single-colour images may show fewer, or no accents at all.
Are my images uploaded?
No — colours are analysed on your device and your image stays private.
How many colours does it extract?
Up to eight dominant colours, ordered from most to least prevalent in the image. Flat or very simple images may return fewer if there aren't enough distinct clusters.
Does the background count towards the palette?
Yes — extraction is based purely on how much area each colour covers, so a large plain background will usually appear as one of the top swatches. Crop it out first if you only want the subject's colours.
How is this different from the Image Color Picker tool?
The Color Picker samples one exact pixel you click on; this tool automatically analyses the whole image and returns a ranked set of the most common colours without you having to hunt for them.
What happens with transparent PNGs?
Transparent areas aren't counted as a colour — the palette is built from the visible, non-transparent pixels only.
Will the extracted HEX codes exactly match my brand colours?
They'll be very close if the source photo was shot or exported without much compression, but JPEG artefacts and lighting can shift a swatch a few shades off — treat it as a strong starting point, not a guaranteed exact match.
Can I extract a palette from a screenshot or logo file?
Yes, any image format your browser can open works, and logos or flat-design screenshots often produce especially clean, accurate palettes since they have fewer gradient transitions than photography.
Advertisement