Image
Colour Palette Extractor
Pull the dominant colours out of a photo and copy their hex codes.
Matching a brand palette to a product photo, pulling a colour scheme out of a mood-board image, checking what actually reads as the "main colour" of a photo rather than guessing by eye — all of it starts with the same question: which colours does this image actually contain, and how much of each.
This samples every pixel of the image and groups them with a median-cut colour quantiser — the same clustering technique the GIF export elsewhere on this site uses to build its own palette — then ranks the resulting colours by how much of the image they actually cover.
How to use it
- Choose an image.
- Set how many colours you want with the slider.
- Click any swatch to copy its hex code.
Questions
Why doesn't the palette include a colour I can clearly see in the photo?
A small but visually prominent detail — a single red object in an otherwise blue-grey photo — can cover so few pixels that it doesn't survive clustering into a small palette. Increasing the number of colours with the slider will surface smaller, less dominant regions.
Does image size affect the result?
The image is downscaled before sampling, since colour distribution doesn't need full resolution to measure accurately and it keeps the tool fast even on a large photo. This only affects speed, not which colours are found.
Are transparent pixels counted?
No — pixels that are mostly transparent are excluded from sampling, so a PNG with transparency won't have that transparency skew the palette toward whatever colour shows through it.