Real dominant colours, not corner samples
The whole image is downsampled and every opaque pixel is bucketed by colour, so the palette reflects what actually dominates the picture rather than one arbitrary pixel.
Color Palette Extractor
Pull the dominant colours out of any photo as copy-ready hex codes.
- Upload
- Single file · 25 MB max
- Privacy
- Nothing is uploaded
- Cost
- Free · no sign-up · no watermark
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Processed entirely on your device
Your file is read, transformed and re-encoded inside this browser tab using JavaScript. There is no upload endpoint — nothing leaves your machine, nothing is stored, and the result is created as a local object URL that disappears when you close the page.
Overview
About the Color Palette Extractor
Extract the dominant colour palette from any image free online — get hex, RGB and each colour's share, sampled entirely in your browser. No upload, no sign-up.
Why extract a palette from an image
A photograph already contains a working colour scheme: the sky, the subject, the background and the light all agree because they were in the same scene. Pulling those colours out gives you a palette that is harmonious by construction, which is faster and more reliable than picking swatches by eye.
How the sampling works
The image is drawn onto a small canvas so a few thousand pixels represent the whole frame. Every opaque pixel is placed into a bucket keyed by its red, green and blue values rounded to five bits each. The buckets are counted, the largest are kept, and each is averaged back to a single representative colour. That averaging is what turns a noisy photograph into a handful of clean swatches.
Reading the share
Each colour reports the fraction of sampled pixels it covers. A colour at 40% is a dominant background or subject; one at 3% is an accent. Designers use this to decide which colour should carry large areas and which should only appear in small doses, so the ratio is as useful as the hex code itself.
Private by design
Sampling happens on a local canvas in your browser. There is no upload, no queue and no stored copy, which matters when the source is an unreleased brand asset, a client mock-up or a personal photograph. Close the tab and nothing remains.
Step by step
How to use the Color Palette Extractor
Drop a photo, logo or screenshot onto the upload area.
Move the slider to choose how many colours to extract, from three to eight.
Read each swatch with its hex code, RGB values and share of the image.
Click any swatch to copy its hex straight to your clipboard.
Why use it
Benefits and common use cases
What this tool is good for, and what it deliberately does not try to do.
Copy-ready hex and RGB
Each swatch gives the hex code and the RGB triple with its percentage share, so you can lift a scheme into CSS, Figma or a design token file without a colour picker.
Private and instant
Sampling runs on a local canvas in milliseconds. Brand assets and unreleased artwork never leave your device.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Short, honest answers about quality, limits and privacy.
How accurate is the extracted palette?
Pixels are grouped into 5-bit-per-channel buckets and each bucket is averaged, which reliably surfaces the dominant colours. Very similar shades may merge into one swatch, and a single small but vivid accent can be outweighed by a large neutral background.
Does it handle transparent images?
Yes. Fully and mostly transparent pixels are ignored, so a logo on an alpha channel returns the colours of the artwork itself rather than blending them with an assumed background.
Can I use these colours commercially?
The hex codes are just measurements of the image you supply; the tool adds no licence of its own. Your right to reuse the underlying artwork depends on the rights to that image, not on the palette extracted from it.