Color Palette From Image
Drop a photo or screenshot to extract its dominant color palette. Click anywhere on the image for an exact pick.
Picked color
Click anywhere on the image to pick a color.
Dominant colors
Upload an image to extract its dominant palette.
Designers often start with a moodboard before a palette — a stack of photos, references and inspiration that captures the feeling they want before any colors are picked. This tool flips the workflow: drop a reference image and the palette appears in seconds, extracted from the actual pixels of the image so the colors carry the same feeling.
Under the hood, the extraction uses a quantization algorithm that bins similar pixel values into a smaller palette. Pure histogram methods overweight the largest flat areas (often the background or sky), so the algorithm gives a slight bias to mid-tone hues that carry visual identity. For a portrait shot, that means skin tones and clothing show up; for a product photo, the product color dominates. The result is six colors ranked by visual importance rather than just raw pixel count.
The whole process runs in your browser using the HTML canvas API. The image never leaves your device — it is loaded into a hidden canvas, pixels are read locally, and the palette is computed in memory. This matters when you are extracting from screenshots that contain confidential mockups, internal tools or unreleased product imagery.
Frequently asked questions
How many colors are extracted?+
Up to six dominant colors. They are ranked by visual importance — a mix of frequency in the image and how distinct each color is from neutrals. Near-identical shades get merged so you get six meaningfully different hues rather than six variants of the same blue.
Can I use this on logos and screenshots?+
Yes — anything your browser can render, the tool can analyze, including PNGs with transparent backgrounds. For logos, transparent pixels are skipped so the extracted palette reflects only the visible logo colors, not the surrounding void.
Why are some extracted colors slightly off?+
The quantization step groups similar pixels into clusters and represents each cluster with a single color, so the output is a representative shade rather than the exact pixel value. If you need an exact pixel value, click on a specific point in the image — the picker mode reads the pixel directly.
Will it work on photos with lots of people or complex scenes?+
Yes, but the result depends on what dominates the frame. A crowd shot tends to surface a few hues that repeat (skin tones, common clothing colors, the dominant background). For more controlled extraction, crop the image to the area that interests you before uploading.
Is this the same as a moodboard color extractor?+
Conceptually yes — moodboard tools usually combine multiple images and extract a unified palette across them. This tool processes one image at a time. If you have multiple references, run them through one at a time and combine the dominant colors into your final palette.