Why extract colours from an image
Designers often start a palette from a photograph or artwork: a product shot that should drive a brand colour, a landscape that sets a mood, or a logo whose exact shades you need. Doing this by eye with an eyedropper is slow and subjective. This tool analyses the whole picture and lists the colours that cover the most area, with their HEX codes ready to use in CSS, design software or a slide template.
How the extraction works
The image is shrunk to at most 120 pixels on its longest side, which keeps the analysis quick on phones and is enough to represent the overall colours. Each pixel is then placed into a bucket based on the top four bits of its red, green and blue values, which groups near-identical shades. Buckets are ranked by pixel count, and the average colour of each bucket is computed. To avoid listing five slightly different blues, the tool skips any colour that is too close to one already chosen. Transparent pixels are ignored. The share shown next to each colour is the percentage of visible pixels in its bucket.
Interpreting the palette
- Large areas such as sky, walls or backgrounds dominate the list, even when the subject uses a more interesting accent colour. Raise the number of colours to see smaller accents.
- Photos contain gradients, so each listed colour is an average of a range of similar shades rather than a single exact pixel.
- Flat graphics and logos give precise results, close to the original brand values, but small anti-aliased edge pixels can add a few intermediate colours.
Using the colours
Check the contrast between your picked text and background colours with the contrast checker before you use them for text, and convert them to RGB or HSL with the colour converter if you want to adjust lightness. Colours as shown on one screen may look different on another, and print needs a colour-managed workflow, so treat the codes as digital starting points. Colour extraction is purely mathematical and does not know which colours look good together.
Privacy
The picture is analysed in your browser and not uploaded. Only the small preview and the colour list stay on the page.