Extract Colour Palette
Gives you the dominant colours in an image as a palette.
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COUNT THE COLOURS IN YOUR IMAGE.
Extract Colour Palette finds the dominant colours of a photo or design and returns them as a palette. You choose the number of colours between 2 and 16; the default is 8. Each colour is shown with its HEX code, RGB value and the percentage of the image it covers, sorted from most to least used. It is used to pull brand colours from a logo, pick presentation colours that match a photo, or see the colour balance of a design.
The method is colour quantization: the image is first reduced to a copy of at most 200 pixels and to 48 candidate colours; near-identical shades are merged, then the number of colours you chose is picked to represent the image best, and the pixels covered by each colour are counted. This way a small but distinct colour (an accent in a logo, a red object in a photo) doesn’t drop out of the palette, and shades of the same colour don’t fill it; if the image has fewer distinct colours than you asked for, the palette comes out shorter. The reduction doesn’t change the result; it only speeds things up. Transparent pixels are left out of the count, so the palette of a logo with a transparent background isn’t mistakenly filled with black. The report can be downloaded as JSON. To get the colour of a single pixel, use “Image Colour Picker”; to derive matching colours from a main colour, use “Colour Palette Generator”.
From start to finish
- Upload your image. Drag and drop or choose the photo, logo or design.
- Choose the number of colours. Between 2 and 16. For a logo 3–5 colours, for a photo 6–10 colours are usually enough.
- Get the palette. Copy the HEX codes or download the report as JSON. The copy on the server is deleted when you leave the tool.
Frequently asked questions
Why did I get fewer colours than I chose?
If the image doesn’t contain that many distinct colours, as with a two-colour logo, the palette comes back with fewer colours.
What do the percentages show?
How much of the visible pixels each colour covers. If sky blue comes out at 40% in a photo, about 40% of the image is close to that shade.
Are the colours exactly the same as the pixels in the image?
The palette merges similar shades into one average colour, so a colour’s HEX code may not match any single pixel exactly. For an exact pixel colour, use “Image Colour Picker”.
Does my file stay on the server?
No. Your file reaches the server only to be processed and is deleted when the job is done; the output is deleted too once you download it and leave the tool. You don't need an account, a name or an email address, and your files are never sent to a third-party service. It is free to use: we set no hourly or daily quota on the number of jobs, we don't make you watch an ad before processing, and we add no watermark to the output.
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