Free Color Palette Extractor
Pull the dominant colors out of any image. Everything runs in your browser on a canvas — your photo is never uploaded.
Choose an image to extract its palette.
Why shrinking the image first makes the palette more accurate, not less
It seems counterintuitive, but this tool deliberately downsamples your image to a small working size (roughly 150 pixels on the longest side) before analyzing a single pixel. A modern photo can have millions of pixels, and the overwhelming majority of them are near-duplicates of their neighbors — a blue sky is thousands of nearly identical shades of blue, not one. Averaging a smaller, representative sample converges on essentially the same dominant colors as scanning every single pixel would, but does it instantly instead of processing millions of data points. The real work happens in "bucketing": each sampled pixel's red, green, and blue values are rounded into a coarse bucket, similar shades collapse into the same bucket, and whichever buckets end up with the most pixels become your extracted palette — literally "which colors cover the most visual area," not just "which exact colors appear."
Fully or mostly transparent pixels are explicitly excluded from that analysis, so a logo or graphic with a transparent background won't have its palette skewed by "transparent" being counted as a color in its own right.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does my image get uploaded anywhere?
No. The image is read and analyzed entirely in your browser using the HTML canvas API. It's never sent to a server, so nothing about your photo is seen by us.
How are the dominant colors chosen?
The image is sampled at reduced resolution, each pixel's color is grouped into a nearby color bucket, and the largest buckets by pixel count become your palette — so a color that covers a lot of the image ranks above a color that appears in just a few pixels.
Why does the tool shrink my image before analyzing it?
Most of a photo's millions of pixels are near-duplicates of their neighbors, so a smaller representative sample converges on essentially the same dominant colors as scanning every pixel — just far faster, since there's dramatically less data to process.
Does a transparent background affect the extracted palette?
No — pixels that are mostly or fully transparent are explicitly skipped during analysis, so a logo or graphic with a transparent background won't have "transparent" itself counted as one of the extracted colors.
Which image formats are supported?
Any format your browser can display as an image — JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, and most others. HEIC photos from an iPhone may need converting to JPG first; our HEIC to JPG tool handles that.
Can I use these colors in CSS or design tools?
Yes — click any swatch to copy its hex code (like #3b82f6), ready to paste into CSS, Figma, Photoshop, or any tool that accepts hex or RGB color values.