Choose a local image and extract the top HEX colors from its pixels.
Image Color Palette Extractor
Choose a local image and extract its top HEX colors straight from the pixels. Pick how many colors to return - 5, 8, 12, or 16 - then click Extract Palette to get clickable swatches you can copy.
Key features
- Samples the top HEX colors from your image on an HTML5 canvas in the browser.
- Returns 5, 8, 12, or 16 colors - pick the count before you extract.
- Shows a preview of your chosen image right away, with a Clear button to reset and start over.
- Copies any swatch to your clipboard with one click - the status line confirms each copy.
- Opens the local file directly in the browser, with nothing uploaded to a server.
- Builds the result entirely on your device, so the image never leaves it and no account is required.
When to use it
- Pulling a brand or design-system palette from a reference photo.
- Grabbing exact HEX values from a screenshot or artwork for CSS or a mockup.
- Turning a single picture into a short, ready-to-paste color list.
Compare with sibling color tools
| Tool | Best for | How you pick colors |
|---|---|---|
| Image Color Palette Extractor | Top colors from a photo | Auto-sampled from image pixels |
| Color Picker | One exact shade | Manual pick on a color wheel |
| WCAG Contrast Checker | Text and background contrast | Enter two colors to test |
Privacy and data handling
Everything runs in the browser. The image is opened locally and never uploaded to a server, the palette is built entirely client-side, and no account is required.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does it decide which colors to return?
It draws your image onto an HTML5 canvas, downscales it for speed, and groups near-identical pixels to find the most frequent tones. Each swatch is a dominant color from the image, ranked by how much of the picture it covers, so you get the colors that define the photo rather than a handful of random pixels.
Will the extracted colors exactly match my image?
They match the image's dominant tones, not every pixel: because similar pixels are grouped and averaged, a swatch is the blended average of a range of near-identical colors. If you need one precise shade or a brand-new color from scratch, use the Color Picker instead - the extractor only reports colors that are already in your image.
What complementary tools work well alongside image color palette extractor?
To pick one exact shade on a color wheel, use the Color Picker; to test text-and-background contrast, use the WCAG Contrast Checker.