Image Palette Extractor
NewExtract the dominant color palette from any uploaded image, with hex codes and percentage breakdown.
…or drag and drop an image here. Processed entirely in your browser.
Colors are extracted by sampling pixels across the image, bucketing them into a coarse color cube, and returning the most frequent bucket centers — a simple quantization approach, not a perceptually-tuned k-means clustering algorithm. Results are a close approximation of the image's dominant colors, not a pixel-perfect histogram.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does this find the "dominant" colors?
It downsamples the image, then buckets every visible pixel into a coarse color cube (grouping similar RGB values together) and returns the most frequent bucket centers as hex colors. This is a simple, fast quantization approach — not a perceptually-tuned clustering algorithm like k-means — so it favors speed and works well for typical photos and UI screenshots.
Why does the percentage next to each swatch not add up to 100%?
If you request fewer colors than there are distinct buckets in the image, some less-frequent colors get left out of the result, so the shown percentages only cover the colors you asked to see, not the entire image.
Does it ignore transparent pixels?
Yes — pixels with low alpha (mostly transparent) are skipped so a transparent PNG background doesn't get counted as a dominant "color."
Can I use the extracted colors directly in CSS?
Yes — every swatch shows a standard 6-digit hex code you can paste directly into CSS, design tools, or the companion Color Palette Generator tool to build tints/shades from it.
Is there a limit to image size?
The image is automatically downscaled to a max dimension of 200px before sampling for performance — this doesn't meaningfully change the dominant colors, since color distribution is preserved well at that resolution, but it keeps extraction fast even for very large photos.