How to extract a color palette from an image
- Drop any image on the dropzone or click to browse, a photograph, a logo, a screenshot, a painting or a moodboard all work.
- The tool reads the picture and shows its five dominant colors as swatches, each labelled with its HEX code, next to a preview of the image you loaded.
- Click a swatch to copy that HEX value straight to your clipboard, ready to paste into your CSS, design tool or style guide.
- Swap in a different image any time to pull a fresh palette; there's nothing to reset.
Why pull colors from an image?
Designers and marketers do this constantly. A client sends a product photo and asks for "a website that feels like this," and you need real, usable values rather than a vague impression. You're building a slide deck and want the accent color to echo the hero photograph. You've found a piece of art or an interior shot with a mood you want to borrow, and you need to translate it into buttons, headings and backgrounds. Sampling by eye is slow and inconsistent, you end up eyedropping one pixel, second-guessing it, and picking something slightly off. Extracting the palette in one step gives you a coherent starting set that actually reflects how much of each color the image contains.
The extractor doesn't just grab five random pixels. It groups similar shades together so the result is five genuinely distinct colors, a warm and a cool, a light and a dark, an accent, rather than five near-identical blues from a photo of the sky. Those HEX codes drop straight into a stylesheet, a Figma file, a brand sheet or the CSS gradient generator, where two of your extracted colors become a ready-made background blend.
Reading a color palette
A palette is more useful once you know what each color is for. In a typical five-color set, the two most dominant shades are usually your backgrounds and large surfaces, often a light neutral and a darker tone, while a mid-range color works well for secondary elements, and the brightest or most saturated swatch is your accent, the one to spend sparingly on buttons, links and highlights. Watch contrast: text needs to sit clearly against whatever is behind it, so pair a dark swatch with a light one for anything readable rather than two mid-tones that blur together. The HEX codes themselves are just red, green and blue written in hexadecimal, #RRGGBB, two digits per channel from 00 to ff, so #ffffff is white, #000000 is black, and a value like #3b82f6 is a medium blue. Because it's plain HEX, every value the tool gives you works directly in CSS, HTML, SVG and virtually every design application without conversion.
Frequently asked questions
How does the extractor pick the colors?
It reads the image pixel by pixel in your browser, groups pixels of similar color together, and surfaces the five most dominant, visually distinct groups as the palette. Grouping is why you get five different colors rather than five shades of the same one.
Why five colors and not more?
Five is a practical size for a working palette, enough for a background, a surface, a text tone and an accent or two, without becoming an unusable rainbow. It mirrors the classic design pattern of a small, deliberate set of colors that hold together across a whole project.
How do I use the HEX codes in my design?
Click a swatch to copy its code, then paste it wherever a color is set: a CSS color or background property, an SVG fill, or the color picker in Figma, Canva or your editor. HEX is understood everywhere, so no conversion is needed.
What image formats work?
Any format your browser can display: JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, AVIF and SVG all work. For iPhone HEIC photos, convert them to JPG first with our HEIC to JPG converter, then extract.
Can I get the exact brand colors from a logo?
Often, yes, a flat logo with clean areas of color extracts very cleanly. Bear in mind that JPG compression can shift colors slightly, so for an official brand you should still confirm against the brand's published HEX values where they exist.
Is my photo uploaded when I extract colors?
No. The analysis runs entirely in your browser using the Canvas API, so the image never leaves your device, safe for unreleased designs, private photos or client work under NDA.