About the Color Palette Extractor tool
Extract the eight dominant colors from any image as a ready-to-use palette. Perfect for building brand colors from a logo or matching a design to a photo.
Color extraction runs on your device. Design work is often confidential before launch, so the image never reaches a server.
How to use it
- Add your image.
- The dominant colors are extracted automatically.
- Copy any swatch as HEX or RGB.
How the colors are chosen
The tool clusters the image's pixels and returns the most representative colors rather than simply the most frequent ones. That distinction matters: a photo dominated by sky would otherwise return five nearly identical blues.
The result is a palette that reflects how the image actually reads, which is what makes it usable for design work.
Turning a palette into a usable scheme
A common approach is the 60-30-10 rule: 60% of the space in a dominant neutral, 30% in a secondary color, 10% in an accent. Extracted palettes give you the candidates; the ratio makes them work together.
Always check text contrast separately. A palette can be beautiful and still fail accessibility requirements when used for body text.
Common mistakes
- Using all extracted colors at equal weight, which produces a chaotic design.
- Extracting from a heavily filtered photo and expecting the original brand colors.
- Ignoring contrast ratios when applying the palette to text.
Questions people ask
How many colors should I use?
Three to five for most designs. More than that becomes difficult to balance.
Can I extract from a screenshot?
Yes, though JPG compression shifts values slightly. PNG screenshots give truer colors.
Does it give me the exact brand color?
Approximately. For exact brand values, use the official brand guide.