Image Color Palette Extractor
Extract dominant colors from any image to create beautiful color palettes. Upload an image and get hex codes, RGB values, and HSL values for design inspiration.
Upload Image
Drag and drop an image here, or click to select
Color Palette
Color palette will appear here
Upload an image to extract colors
About Color Palette Extraction
- • Extract dominant colors from any image using advanced perceptual analysis
- • Adjust extraction settings to get 2-20 colors with customizable distance thresholds
- • Export palettes in multiple formats: ACO (Adobe), Figma plugins, CSS, SCSS, Tailwind, and more
- • Click any color value (HEX, RGB, or HSL) to copy it to your clipboard
- • Perfect for creating brand color schemes, design systems, and color documentation
- • Works with JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP and other common image formats
About Image Color Palette Extractor
An Image Color Palette Extractor is a tool that analyzes images you select to identify and extract the most dominant and representative colors, creating organized color palettes. This tool groups similar pixel colors and ranks them by how much of the image they cover, giving you color codes in multiple formats for design use.
Why use a Image Color Palette Extractor?
Using an Image Color Palette Extractor saves time in color research and provides professional color inspiration from real-world sources like photography, artwork, and nature. It eliminates the guesswork in color selection by giving you the dominant colors of the image, perfect for creating cohesive design schemes.
Who is it for?
This tool is invaluable for graphic designers seeking color inspiration, web developers creating brand-consistent themes, interior designers matching color schemes, digital artists studying color relationships, photographers analyzing their work, and anyone who wants to extract professional color palettes from visual references.
How to use the tool
Upload your image file (JPG, PNG, WebP, etc.) using the file selector or drag-and-drop
Wait for the tool to analyze the image and extract dominant colors
Review the generated color palette showing the most prominent colors from your image
Copy individual colors in HEX, RGB, or HSL format as needed
Export the entire palette or save individual colors for use in your design projects
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I extract colours from an image online?
Drag and drop your image file (any format your browser can decode, such as PNG, JPG, WebP or GIF). The tool samples up to about 64,000 pixels, groups them by colour similarity, and outputs up to N dominant colours (8 by default, 2-20 configurable) with their share of the image. You can copy individual HEX, RGB or HSL values or download the palette in formats including JSON, CSV, CSS, SCSS, Tailwind, GIMP and PNG. Extraction runs entirely in your browser; your image is not uploaded.
How is the palette computed?
The image is drawn to a canvas in your browser and sampled (up to about 64,000 pixels). The extract-colors library groups pixels whose colours are closer than the Colour distance setting, then drops colours too close in saturation, lightness or hue to one already kept, and ranks the rest by the share of pixels they cover. Fully transparent pixels are ignored; near-black and near-white pixels are kept. The result can contain fewer colours than you request if the image has few distinct colours. Raising Colour distance merges more shades into one; lowering it keeps finer shades.
Are my images uploaded to a server?
No. The image never leaves your device: it is decoded and analysed entirely in your browser with JavaScript and a canvas, so there is no upload, no server processing and nothing stored or logged. You can confirm in DevTools' Network tab that selecting an image triggers no request carrying it. That makes the tool safe for proprietary brand images and unreleased designs.
What's the palette useful for?
Common uses. (1) Brand colour discovery — extract the dominant colours from a logo to use as the brand palette. (2) Web design — pull colours from a mood-board image to use as accent colours in CSS. (3) Data visualisation — derive a colour scheme from a domain-specific image (a sunset photo → warm-toned palette for a sunset-related chart). (4) Image categorisation — group images by their dominant colour signatures. The output hex codes work directly in CSS (`color: #abc123`) or design tools.
How many colours should I extract?
Depends on use case. 3-5 colours for a brand palette or simple colour scheme (logo, header, accent, text, background). 8-12 colours for richer design systems with primary, secondary, and accent variations. 16+ colours for detailed palettes used in data visualisation or generative art. More colours capture more detail but the palette becomes harder to use cohesively. Start with 5 and increase if needed.
Why does the palette include similar-looking colours?
Two common reasons. (1) The image has subtle colour variations the extractor picked up (e.g. multiple shades of blue in a sky). (2) The Colour distance or Saturation distance setting is low, so close shades are kept as separate colours. Raise the Colour distance slider, or request fewer colours, to merge similar shades. For a more distinct palette, sample colours manually with a colour picker after extraction.
Can I extract palettes from multiple images?
This tool handles one image at a time, so batch extraction means repeating the steps per image; there is no bulk or scripted mode. Each palette can be downloaded as JSON, CSV, XML and other formats if you want to collect the results into one dataset for clustering, filtering, or visualisation.
When should I extract image palettes?
Common cases. (1) Branding — distilling brand colours from a logo for a style guide. (2) Web design — colour-matching a website's palette to a featured image (hero, blog cover). (3) Data art / generative design — using real-world image colours as inputs to generative algorithms. (4) Image organisation — categorising large image libraries by dominant colours. (5) Mood-boarding — sampling colours from references for design inspiration. The hex codes are directly usable in CSS, design tools, and code.
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