Color Palette Generator From Image
Upload any image or photo and extract its color palette with hex codes. Extraction runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored.
Drop an image here
Extraction runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded to a server, and nothing is stored.
- #efecf6
- #c7e4cf
- #919bc3
- #5fb2a6
- #4189ae
How image color extraction works
The tool downscales your image to a small working size, reads every remaining pixel, and then runs median-cut quantisation. That algorithm repeatedly splits the color space along whichever axis currently has the widest spread, until it has as many groups as you asked for swatches. Each group is then averaged to produce one color.
Median cut is used rather than simple frequency counting because frequency counting is close to useless on photographs. The most common pixels in almost any photo are low-saturation mid-tones, so sorting by count returns five near-identical browns. Splitting the color space instead guarantees the result spans the range of the image.
The final step reorders the swatches by lightness and nudges apart any two colors that came out visually identical. That is what makes the output immediately usable as a design palette instead of a technical report.
Getting a better palette out of any photo
Crop before you extract. Removing a large flat sky or a background wall changes the result far more than any setting on this page, because those regions dominate the pixel count without contributing anything to the mood you are trying to capture.
Increase the swatch count if the image has several distinct subjects, and reduce it if you want a tight, usable brand palette. Five is the default because five is the smallest set that can supply a background, a surface, a text color and two accents.
Finally, remember that photographs rarely hand you both a near-white and a near-black. If you intend to build an interface from the result, adjusting the two extremes by hand is normal practice rather than a compromise.
Color Palette Generator From Image FAQ
How do I get a color palette from an image?
Drop a photo, screenshot or artwork onto the panel above. The colors are read directly from the pixels in your browser and returned as hex codes within a moment. You can then copy them individually or as a set.
Are my images uploaded to a server?
No. Extraction runs entirely on your device using the HTML canvas API. The image never leaves your browser, nothing is stored, and the tool works offline once the page has loaded.
What image formats are supported?
Anything your browser can decode, which in practice means JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, AVIF and SVG. The file size limit is 12 MB, and large images are downscaled before analysis for speed.
How do I find my Instagram color palette?
Take a screenshot of your Instagram grid and upload it here. The extracted palette shows you the colors your feed is genuinely built from, which makes planning cohesive posts far easier than guessing.
Why are the extracted colors different from what I see?
A photograph is mostly mid-tone pixels, so a naive average returns grey sludge. This tool balances how often a color appears against how distinctive it is, which favours the colors that actually characterise the image over the ones that merely cover the most area.