Image Palette Extractor

This palette extractor reads the colors that are actually in your image — not colors computed from theory. Upload a photo, choose how many colors you want (3 to 12, five or six suits most jobs), and the tool returns a palette of swatches sorted by weight: the dominant color first, each with its HEX code, its share of the image in percent, and a copy button. Exports are one click away — a CSS custom properties block ready for a stylesheet, a JSON array for scripts and design tokens, and a palette strip PNG for mood boards.

Under the hood the tool uses median-cut quantization, the same algorithm GIF encoders rely on to squeeze millions of colors into a small palette. The image is first downscaled to roughly ten thousand pixels on a local canvas; then the color space is repeatedly split at the median of its widest channel until the requested number of clusters remains, and each cluster is averaged into one swatch. That is why the result reflects what your eye sees as the image's character rather than a handful of random sampled pixels.

Everything happens in your browser: no upload, no queue, no account, and full safety for unpublished designs, client photos and internal screenshots. Any format the browser can decode works — PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, and transparent areas are ignored so PNG logos produce clean palettes.

Typical uses: turning a brand photo shoot into design-system colors, matching a landing page to a hero image, generating chart or theme colors from cover art, or documenting the palette of an illustration. Note the difference from the color palette generator, which builds harmonious palettes from one base color you choose — this tool extracts the palette a real image already has. Picked a swatch and need it in another notation? The color format converter translates HEX to RGB, HSL and CMYK.