Image Color Palette Extractor
Pick exact pixel colours from a photo and pull out its dominant colour palette.
Move over the image to preview a colour, click to lock it, then hit “Save” to keep it below.
Everything happens locally in your browser — images are never uploaded anywhere.
Upload a photo to pick the exact colour at any pixel, or extract the image's dominant colour palette automatically — useful for matching a brand colour from a logo, or building a palette inspired by a photograph.
Every picked colour is shown as hex, RGB, and HSL, ready to copy directly into design software or CSS.
Why the picked colour may not be the 'real' colour
- JPEG compression shifts colours subtly, especially at edges and in flat areas. A logo saved as JPEG will not give you the exact brand hex.
- Screenshots are affected by the display's colour profile, so the same image can sample differently on two monitors.
- Anti-aliased edges blend the foreground and background, so a pixel on the edge of a letter is neither colour.
- Photographs carry the colour of their lighting — a white shirt under tungsten light samples as orange.
- For an exact brand colour, always ask for the official hex or Pantone reference rather than sampling from an image.
How dominant colour extraction works
Extracting a palette means grouping millions of pixels into a handful of representative colours — a clustering problem. The pixels are treated as points in colour space and grouped by proximity, with each cluster's centre becoming a swatch.
This is why the result sometimes feels wrong: a photo that reads as 'a red flower' may return mostly greens and browns, because the background occupies far more pixels than the subject. Frequency is not the same as visual importance. If the palette misses the colour you wanted, crop to the subject first and re-extract.
Frequently asked questions
- How accurate is the picked colour?
- The colour reflects the exact pixel value in the uploaded image file, though display calibration and image compression (like JPEG artifacts) can shift the true rendered colour slightly.
- How many colours does the dominant palette extraction return?
- It groups the image's pixels into a handful of representative clusters, typically five to eight swatches that best summarise the image's overall colour makeup.
- Is my photo uploaded to a server?
- No — the image is processed entirely in your browser and is never uploaded anywhere.
- Why doesn't the extracted palette include the colour I expected?
- Extraction weights by pixel count, so a large background dominates a small subject. Crop to the part of the image you care about and extract again.
- Can I use this to find a brand's exact colour?
- It gets you close, but compression and colour profiles shift the values slightly. For an exact match, use the brand's published hex or Pantone reference.