Image Color Extractor
Extract the dominant colours from any image as a ready-to-use palette (HEX, RGB and CSS array). Everything runs in your browser.
What is the Image Color Extractor?
The Image Color Extractor analyses a photo or artwork and pulls out its dominant colours as a ready-to-use palette. The tool clusters similar pixels together, ranks them by frequency and returns a set of HEX / RGB values you can drop straight into a design system, slide theme or website.
Colour is one of the fastest ways to lock a design to a brand or mood. Instead of eye-balling shades from a photo, this tool gives you exact values in seconds. That saves designers, marketers, developers and hobbyists hours of manual sampling.
The whole process is in-browser: pixels are read, quantised and displayed without leaving your device. Client artwork under NDA, family photos and confidential product shots stay private.
How to use the Image Color Extractor
- 1Upload the image you want to analyse.
- 2Pick how many colours you want (typically 5–10).
- 3Wait a moment for the tool to sample the pixels.
- 4Copy any HEX, RGB or HSL value with a single click.
- 5Export the whole palette as CSS variables, JSON or an image swatch strip.
Key features
- Configurable palette size (3–20 colours)
- HEX, RGB and HSL output
- One-click copy for each colour
- CSS variables export
- Palette download as PNG or JSON
- Handles JPG, PNG, WebP and SVG
- Runs offline in the browser
Examples
Brand palette from a logo
Upload a logo and pull the six brand colours ready to paste into your Tailwind config.
Mood board from a photo
Extract 12 dominant hues from a sunset photo to guide a marketing campaign.
Website hero coordinated colours
Use the palette from your hero image to theme buttons and accents automatically.
Why use this tool
- Eliminates guesswork when picking colours
- Delivers exact HEX values, not approximations
- Speeds up brand-consistent design work
- Great for accessibility audits that need contrast against real backgrounds
- Works with any image — photo, illustration or screenshot
Common use cases
- Building a brand palette from a logo
- Theming a slide deck around a photo
- Creating a colour scheme for a landing page hero
- Auditing colour contrast in existing designs
- Producing mood boards for interior design
- Choosing accent colours for artwork prints
Frequently asked questions
How is the palette calculated?
The tool downsamples the image and clusters similar pixels using a colour-quantisation algorithm, then returns the top clusters by frequency.
Why do I see slight colour shifts between palettes?
Clustering is deterministic per image, but changing the palette size can regroup neighbouring shades slightly.
Can I export to design tools like Figma?
Yes — copy the HEX codes or download the JSON, then import into Figma via its variables panel.
Does the tool work on transparent images?
Yes. Transparent pixels are ignored so they do not skew the palette.
Is my image sent to a server?
No. All colour extraction happens locally in your browser.