🎨 Color Palette Extractor ☆

Extract a color palette from any image

Free Color Palette Extractor scans a photo or design and pulls out its dominant colors. Drop an image, get an instant palette ranked by frequency, and copy each swatch's HEX, RGB or HSL value with one click.

What you get

• Dominant colors ranked by pixel coverage
• HEX, RGB and HSL values for every swatch
• One-click copy for design tools and CSS

Common uses

• Building a brand palette from a logo or photo
• Matching UI colors to a reference image
• Picking print or paint colors from a picture

Analysis runs in your browser on a small canvas copy, the full-resolution image never leaves your device.

How palette extraction works

The image is drawn onto a small canvas, its pixels are quantized into color buckets, and the most representative colors are ranked by frequency and visual distance. The result is a palette that reflects what the eye actually sees rather than an alphabetical list of every shade. Each swatch can be copied as HEX, RGB or HSL, so a designer can paste a brand color straight into CSS, a design tool or a print specification.

Capabilities and constraints

Privacy: images are analyzed locally

Mood boards, client mockups and product photos are often confidential, so the image is read locally and only a reduced copy is processed in memory. The image is analysed in memory only. Nothing is transmitted or logged, and the tool runs offline once loaded.

Building usable palettes

• Start from a clean, high-contrast image for the most representative colors.
• Treat the extracted list as a starting point, then adjust for accessibility contrast.
• Keep 4-6 colors for a brand palette; more becomes hard to apply consistently.
• Copy HEX for screens and CMYK conversions for print checks.
• Re-run after editing an image to confirm the palette still holds.

Related: browse all image tools for color picking, compression and conversion.

Palette theory: dominance, contrast and accessible combinations

An extracted palette is more useful when you know which colour plays which role. Most images yield one or two dominant colours that cover the largest area, several secondary tones and a small number of accent colours with high saturation. Grouping them that way makes a design coherent: use a dominant tone for large surfaces, a secondary for cards and borders, and reserve accents for buttons and links. Contrast decides readability. The WCAG guidelines ask for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal body text and 3:1 for large text; two colours that look different on screen can still fail because perceived brightness, not hue, drives the ratio. The extractor reports the values you need to check that pairing, and swapping a light accent for a darker shade of the same hue is often enough to pass. Remember that colour is not the only channel: never encode meaning with hue alone, because around one in twelve men has some form of colour-vision deficiency. Photographs also carry mood, warm palettes feel energetic, desaturated ones feel calm, so sample from an image that matches the message rather than from the first result. The extraction runs in your browser, so client artwork and unreleased product shots stay private.