Palette Extractor
Pull the dominant colours out of any image.
Runs in your browser, nothing is uploadedFree, no signupNo watermark
Drop an image here
or click to choose one. It never leaves your device.
Three steps
How to use the palette extractor
- 01
Drop in an image
Add a photo, an illustration or a screenshot of a design.
- 02
Choose how many colours
From a single dominant colour up to a full ten-swatch palette.
- 03
Copy the swatches
Each colour is given with its value, ready to paste.
Why this one
What makes it different
Clustered, not sampled
Colours are found by grouping the whole image rather than sampling a few points, so the result reflects what the image is actually made of.
Adjustable count
One colour for a themed background, five for a scheme, ten for an illustration. The right number depends entirely on the job.
Values ready to use
Each swatch is a value you can copy, rather than a picture of a palette you then have to sample by hand.
How this tool handles your files
- Where it runs
- Your browser, not a server
- Uploads
- None, ever
- Account
- Not required
- Watermark
- Never added
The short version
About palette extractor
Pulling a palette out of an image is how most colour schemes actually get made: someone finds a photograph or an illustration with the right feeling and works backwards to the values. The interesting part is how often the result surprises people, since the colours an image is mostly made of are rarely the colours anyone remembers seeing in it.
Questions
Palette Extractor FAQ
How are the colours chosen?
By clustering the image's pixels into groups and taking each group's representative colour, so the palette reflects the whole image rather than a handful of sampled points.
How many colours should a palette have?
Three to five for a usable scheme: a dominant, an accent, and a neutral or two. Ten is useful for analysing an illustration, and unwieldy as a design system.
Why is the palette mostly greys and browns?
Because the image mostly is. Photographs contain far more muted tone than people expect, and the dominant colours of a landscape are usually not the ones the eye remembers.
Can I get a palette from a website?
Screenshot it and drop the screenshot in. That also captures how the colours appear in context, including anything a gradient or overlay is doing.
Free, and staying free
The tools are free because the icons are the business.
Thridy is a library of thousands of 3D icons in one consistent style, free for commercial use with no attribution and no account. The tools exist so you never have to upload an image to somebody else's server to resize it.
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