Steal a Color Palette from Any Photo
You saw a sunset photo on Instagram and the colors are gorgeous, deep orange, warm pink, soft lavender, dark navy. You want those exact colors for your website. But eyedropping individual pixels gives you random noise, not the dominant palette.
Drop an image into this tool and it extracts the 4 to 8 most dominant colors using a median cut algorithm, the same color quantization approach used in professional image processing. Each extracted color shows its HEX code, and you can copy them individually or grab the whole palette at once.
How the Extraction Works
The tool draws your image onto a hidden HTML5 Canvas, reads the raw pixel data, and recursively splits the color space into buckets. The average color of each bucket becomes a palette color. It’s not random sampling, it’s finding the colors that actually occupy the most space in the image.
This matters because it means a sunset photo won’t just give you “orange”, it’ll give you the specific warm tones, the lavender sky, the dark silhouette colors, and the golden highlights that define that particular sunset. Upload a product photo and you’ll get the brand colors, packaging tones, and background shades.
Getting Good Results
Images with distinct color regions work best. A moody monochromatic photo will give you five slightly different grays. A vibrant landscape with blue sky, green trees, red flowers, and brown earth gives you a rich, diverse palette.
Start with 4 colors for a minimal palette, it forces the algorithm to pick only the most dominant tones. Bump to 6 or 8 for more nuance. You can change the count and re-extract without re-uploading the image.
One thing to know: the algorithm picks colors by pixel count, not by what catches your eye. A huge blue sky will dominate the palette even if the tiny red barn is the visual focal point. Increasing the color count usually surfaces those less dominant but important accent colors.
Design Workflows
Website design. Pull colors from your hero image and use them for the surrounding page elements, instant visual cohesion without guesswork.
Social media. Extract colors from a feature photo and use them for text overlays, borders, and background fills. The post feels like a designed piece rather than text slapped on an image.
Brand exploration. Upload mood board images, film stills, or nature photography to find color palettes that evoke the feeling you’re after. Way more effective than browsing generic palette websites.
Refine extracted colors with the Color Picker, expand them into full harmony palettes with the Palette Generator, or look up their names with the Color Name Finder.
Your image never leaves your browser. It’s processed locally using the Canvas API, works with PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, and BMP files. Nothing gets uploaded or stored.