Image Color Palette

Extract dominant colors from any image. Perfect for designers finding color inspiration. This tool processes all data locally in your browser. No information is ever sent to any server. Completely free, no registration required.

How to Use the Image Color Palette

1. Enter your input values above
2. Results update automatically
3. Copy or download the output

What is a Image Color Palette?

An Image Color Palette Extractor analyzes any uploaded image and extracts its dominant color palette — the 5-10 most prominent colors, their hex codes, RGB values, and percentage coverage. Designers use this to create color schemes from photographs, developers use it for dynamic theming (background color from album art), and brand designers use it to reverse-engineer competitor color palettes from screenshots. The tool uses the median cut color quantization algorithm for accurate palette extraction.

How Does It Work?

Upload an image (or paste a URL). The extractor resamples the image, reduces it to a representative palette using color quantization, and returns the most dominant colors. Each color shows: hex code, RGB values, HSL values, and percentage of image covered. The palette is sorted by dominance. Export options: copy individual hex codes, download the full palette as CSS variables or a Tailwind color config, or export as a .aco (Photoshop) swatch file.

Formula

Color Quantization (Median Cut Algorithm Simplified):\n1. Sample image pixels (typically downscale for performance)\n2. Build a 3D RGB color histogram\n3. Recursively partition the color space at the median of the largest-dimension bucket\n4. Continue until desired number of colors (N) is reached\n5. Average colors in each bucket → final palette\n\nColor Formats:\n• HEX: #1A2B3C\n• RGB: rgb(26, 43, 60)\n• HSL: hsl(210, 40%, 17%)\n• Coverage: pixels in bucket ÷ total pixels × 100%\n\nDominance = bucket size (number of pixels in that color cluster)\nComplementary = color at H+180° in HSL space

Who Uses This Tool?

• Web designers extracting color schemes from brand photography
• UI developers building dynamic theming that adapts to user-uploaded images
• Graphic designers reverse-engineering color palettes from inspiration images
• Brand designers ensuring visual consistency across marketing materials
• Data visualization: generating distinct, accessible colors for chart series

Pro Tips

• For brand color extraction, use clean logo images with flat backgrounds. Busy photos produce palettes of muddy transitional colors
• The first 3-5 colors are usually the most useful — beyond that, the colors tend to be noise or very minor accent shades
• Enable 'vibrant mode' to boost saturation of extracted colors — photos often produce desaturated results because most real-world surfaces are muted
• Combine with our Color Contrast Checker to verify accessibility of extracted palettes against white/black backgrounds

Frequently Asked Questions about Image Color Palette

How many colors should I extract?

5-8 is ideal for most uses — enough to create a full design system (primary, secondary, accent, background, text) without overwhelming choice. More than 10 colors tends to include noise.

Can I extract colors from a website screenshot?

Yes, but be aware: (1) screenshots may be low resolution and introduce compression artifacts, (2) the palette will include colors from the entire screenshot including text and UI elements. Crop to the area of interest for best results.

Free online Image Color Palette — no signup, 100% client-side processing. All data stays in your browser.