Drop an image to extract color palette
What does a color palette extractor do?
Given a photo, logo, or screenshot, this tool samples the image's pixels and reports the colors that appear most often, as hex codes with their approximate share of the image. Rather than eyeballing a photo and guessing at a hex value with a color picker, you get a ranked list of the colors that actually dominate it — useful groundwork for building a UI theme, a chart palette, or marketing assets that need to match a brand photo.
Extraction happens by downscaling the image to a small canvas for speed, quantizing each pixel's RGB channels into buckets (so near-identical shades count as one color instead of hundreds of imperceptibly different ones), then ranking buckets by frequency.
When to use it
Use it when you're designing a page or component around a hero image or product photo and want colors that visually harmonize with it, when extracting a rough brand palette from a logo image that didn't come with documented hex values, or when building a data visualization and want accent colors pulled from a related photo rather than an arbitrary preset.
The result is a starting point, not a final palette — quantization means very close shades merge together, so for precise brand colors, cross-check the top results against a proper color picker on the original asset.
Example
Drop a sunset photo in and extract 8 colors: you'll typically see a few warm oranges and reds from the sky at the top of the list by percentage, a darker silhouette color for foreground elements, and one or two blues or purples from shadowed areas — giving you a ready-made palette of hex codes to build a themed page around, each with its share of the image shown as a percentage bar.
How to use the Image Color Palette Extractor tool
- 1
Drop or select an image
Drag an image file onto the upload area, or click it to choose a file.
- 2
Set the color count
Choose how many top colors to extract (2–20).
- 3
Click Extract
The image is sampled and its most frequent colors are ranked by share.
- 4
Copy a hex code
Click Copy next to any swatch to grab its hex value for use elsewhere.
Frequently asked questions
Is my image uploaded to a server?
No — the image is read locally via the File API and sampled on an in-browser canvas. Because the input is an image file rather than pasteable text, this tool doesn't offer a shareable permalink the way text-based tools do; the image itself never leaves your device to begin with.
Why don't the extracted colors exactly match a pixel I picked in an editor?
Colors are quantized into buckets (channels rounded to steps of 32) before counting, so a specific pixel's exact RGB value gets merged with visually similar neighbors. This produces a cleaner, deduplicated palette but sacrifices pixel-perfect precision — use an eyedropper tool if you need one exact value.
Does image size or format matter?
Any common image format (JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF) works, since extraction samples from a downscaled 100px-wide canvas regardless of the source resolution — this keeps extraction fast even for large photos, at the cost of missing very small or fine details in the color count.
What's a good color count to pick?
5–8 works well for most photos — enough to capture the dominant hues without the list being dominated by near-duplicate shades. Increase it for images with more distinct color regions, like a multi-panel graphic or a product photo with several distinct materials.
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