Image Color Extractor — Pull Palettes from Any Photo
Upload any image and instantly extract its dominant colors, explore harmony variations, and export a complete design palette in CSS, Tailwind, JSON, or PNG format.
Place up to three draggable color pickers anywhere on the image to sample exact pixel colors. Every picked color generates a full set of tints, shades, and harmony schemes.
How It Works
Upload Your Image
Drag and drop or browse for any JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, or AVIF image up to 10MB. The image is processed entirely in your browser — never uploaded to a server.
Pick and Drag
Three color picker dots are placed automatically on the dominant colors. Drag them anywhere on the image to sample any pixel. Click the image to add more pickers up to the three-picker limit.
Explore and Export
Each picked color generates tints, shades, and harmony schemes. Export your full palette as CSS variables, a Tailwind config, JSON, or a downloadable PNG swatch sheet.
How Color Extraction Works
The tool uses k-means clustering — the same algorithm used by professional design tools — to group similar pixels and find the most representative colors. Rather than just counting the most frequent pixels (which would return too many near-identical shades), k-means finds the mathematical center of each color cluster.
To keep processing fast even on large images, the algorithm samples every fourth pixel and uses k-means++ initialization for better color spread. The result is three dominant colors that genuinely represent the image's color story.
The draggable pickers sample a small area around the cursor position and average the pixels for stability — so you get a smooth, representative color rather than a noisy single-pixel value.
Use Cases
Brand Color Extraction
Extract the exact color palette from a logo, product photo, or brand asset to use consistently across your UI.
Photography-Inspired Palettes
Turn a landscape, fashion, or architecture photo into a cohesive color scheme for your next design project.
Competitive Research
Screenshot a competitor's website or app and extract their color palette to understand their design language.
Art Direction
Sample colors from reference images, mood boards, or illustrations to anchor your design in a specific visual tone.
Design System Seeding
Extract dominant colors then use the tints and shades to build a complete token-ready color scale.
Content Matching
Match UI colors to hero images or thumbnails for cohesive page designs by sampling the image directly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my image uploaded to a server?
No. All processing happens entirely in your browser using the HTML5 Canvas API. Your images never leave your device.
How accurate is the automatic color extraction?
The k-means++ algorithm is the industry standard for color quantization. It finds the three most representative color clusters rather than just the most frequent pixels, which gives more useful and visually distinct dominant colors.
Why does my extracted color look slightly different from the image?
Dominant color extraction averages over a cluster of pixels, not a single point. This gives a more stable, representative color but may differ slightly from any specific pixel. Use the draggable pickers for precise point sampling.
Can I extract more than 3 colors?
The picker limit is 3 for clarity and performance. However, the export combines both the 3 auto-extracted dominant colors and the 3 picker colors into a single palette of up to 6 unique colors.
What formats can I export the palette in?
CSS custom properties (--color-1: #hex), a Tailwind config snippet, a JSON array with hex/rgb/hsl values per color, and a downloadable PNG swatch sheet.