About this tool
Good palettes come from real imagery: a photo that captures a mood, a screenshot of a design you admire, a product shot that has to anchor a landing page. Color Palette Extractor pulls the dominant colors out of any image you drop on it, entirely in your browser. The picture is sampled onto a small canvas and run through a median-cut quantization pass that clusters pixels into a palette — choose anywhere from four to twelve swatches depending on whether you want broad themes or fine detail. Every swatch shows its hex value and copies it to the clipboard on click, with the RGB and HSL equivalents listed underneath so you can paste straight into CSS, a Tailwind config or a design tool. The image never leaves your machine, which makes the tool safe for unreleased product photography, client work under NDA or personal photos. Use it to build a theme around a hero image, to check whether your brand colors actually dominate your marketing shots, or to grab an accent color for a chart that sits next to a photo. Combined with the OG image generator, it is a complete tiny branding kit that fits in a browser tab.
How to use Color Palette Extractor
- Drop an image onto the tool or click to browse.
- Choose how many colors to extract (4 to 12) with the swatch-count control.
- Click any swatch to copy its hex value.
- Read the RGB and HSL equivalents under each swatch for use in CSS or design tools.
Frequently asked questions
Is my image uploaded?
No. Sampling and quantization run on a local canvas in your browser. The file never leaves your device.
How does the quantization work?
Pixels are clustered with a median-cut algorithm: the color space is repeatedly split along its widest channel, then each box is averaged into one representative color.
Why do the colors look different from what I picked by eye?
Eyeballing picks saturated stand-outs; quantization averages what actually dominates by area. Large backgrounds win over small bright details, which is usually what you want for a theme.
Can I get more than twelve colors?
Twelve keeps swatches meaningful. For finer analysis, crop the region of interest first — the palette of a detail is more useful than a 30-color average of everything.