Color Palette Extractor
Drop any image and pull out the dominant colours in seconds — hex codes, RGB, and proportions. Perfect for moodboards, brand exploration, and pattern design.
What is colour palette extraction?
Colour palette extraction finds the dominant coloursin an image — the ones that take up the most pixels, not every unique colour. It's how designers pull a brand palette out of a logo, how moodboard apps summarise a reference photo, and how textile designers lock down a colour story for a collection from a single source image.
We use bucket quantization— each pixel's RGB is rounded to 4 bits per channel, producing a 4096-cell histogram. The top N buckets (by pixel count) become swatches; each swatch's colour is the mean of the pixels that fell into that bucket. The result is deterministic: the same image produces the exact same palette every time. That matters for brand workflows where you need to re-run the extraction in a month and get the same numbers back.
Free mode gives hex and RGB with coverage percentages. Signup unlocks our full Pro colour toolkit — the Pantone Colour Finder for TCX matching and the Color-Match tool with CIEDE2000 ΔE for production-grade colour QC. If you're working with the extracted colours in a larger design, pair this with our AI Image Upscaler to get production-resolution source art at the palette you just locked in.
What people extract palettes for
Extract a brand palette from a logo
Drop the logo, pick 3–5 colours, and get the brand primaries plus any accent colours. The coverage percentage column makes it obvious which colours are hero vs accent. Deterministic output means you can re-run the extraction a year later and match the palette you locked in originally.
Build a moodboard palette from a photo
Creative-direction moodboards benefit from a distilled colour story. Pick a reference photo (an interior shot, a textile swatch, a still-life), extract 6–8 colours, and use them as the anchor for the rest of the board. Copy as CSS variables to bring the palette straight into Figma or a design system.
Lock a colour story from a textile swatch
Surface-pattern and textile designers pull hero + accent colours from a vintage swatch or nature reference, then reuse that palette across a collection. Follow up with our AI Image Sharpener first if your swatch scan is soft — sharper source produces a cleaner palette because the bucket algorithm can distinguish adjacent colours better.
Pull web colours from a UI screenshot
Analysing a competitor site, auditing an existing app's palette, or capturing the colours from a design reference — drop the screenshot, extract 6–8 swatches, copy as CSS variables. Faster than eye-dropping in Chrome DevTools, and you get the coverage breakdown for free.
Create a photo palette for Instagram or Pinterest
Palette posts are evergreen social content. Drop a striking photo, extract 5 colours, screenshot the result, post. The deterministic output keeps palettes consistent across a series — day 1 of a cohesive feed looks like day 30.
Feed colours into a pattern generator
Extract the palette you want the pattern to express, then build motifs in that exact colour range using our Seamless Pattern Generator or any illustration app. Palette-first pattern design produces more coherent collections than designing the motif first and shoehorning colours in after.
How many colours should I extract?
Brand palettes
Logo extraction, core brand identity, minimal design systems. Smaller palettes force distinction between hero and accent. Best for simple flat-colour sources.
Moodboards + photos
Safe middle ground. Captures the hero colour, two or three supporting tones, and a dark/light anchor. Good default for photographic inputs.
Complex imagery
Dense photography, multicolour textile patterns, layered illustrations. Produces finer gradations of similar tones. Use when the image genuinely has that many distinct colour regions.
Four steps, no signup
Upload an image
Drop any JPG, PNG, or WEBP up to 10MB. Photos, logos, illustrations, artwork, fabric swatches, screenshots — anything with colour. Processing is instant, nothing is uploaded.
Pick how many colours
Between 3 and 8 dominant colours. 3–4 is ideal for brand palette extraction; 6–8 captures more nuance from complex photos or textile swatches.
Review the palette
Each swatch shows its hex code, RGB values, and the percentage of the image it covers. Sorted by dominance so the hero colour is always at the top.
Copy or save
Click any swatch to copy its hex. Click copy-all to get the full palette as CSS variables, a comma-separated hex list, or plain RGB values ready to paste into Figma, Adobe, or any design tool.
Deterministic, private, fast
Most online palette extractors run random k-means and give different results each time. Ours is bucket-quantized and deterministic — your palette is repeatable.
Deterministic output
Same image → same palette every time. Critical for brand workflows and palette version control.
Instant
Image never leaves your device. No upload, no server, no logging. Works fully offline after first load.
Coverage percentages
Each swatch shows what % of the image it covers so you can distinguish hero from accent at a glance.
Copy-friendly output
Single-click copy on any hex; copy-all for CSS variables, comma-separated hex, or plain RGB — pick whichever your workflow needs.
Frequently asked
Q.How does dominant colour extraction work?
Q.Can I extract a brand palette from a logo?
Q.Does it give me Pantone matches?
Q.Is this really free? Do you store my image?
Q.Why might the palette look different from another tool's?
Q.Can I use the extracted colours commercially?
Q.What formats does it accept?
Q.Can I save palettes for later?
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