How many colors should I extract from an image?

Extract 5-8 colors for most use cases. Fewer than 5 misses subtle accent colors. More than 10 includes too many near-duplicates and minor tones. For complex images like paintings, you can increase to 12-15, but most design systems only need a handful of colors.

Can the tool extract colors from gradients accurately?

Yes, but gradients produce multiple extracted colors—one for each distinct stop along the gradient. If your image has a blue-to-purple gradient, the tool will extract blue, purple, and 2-3 intermediate tones. To get the exact gradient endpoints, sample the start and end manually.

Does the extractor work on screenshots of websites?

Yes. Upload a screenshot, and the tool extracts the dominant colors from the UI. This is useful for competitor analysis or recreating a design without access to the original files. Note that text-heavy screenshots may extract background and text colors as dominant, which might not be the brand's accent colors.

How accurate is color extraction compared to manual eyedropper sampling?

Extraction finds the average or most frequent color across many pixels, while an eyedropper samples one exact pixel. Extraction is more representative of the overall image but may not match a specific pixel's exact value. Use extraction for palettes, eyedropper for precision.

Can I exclude white, black, or gray from the extracted palette?

Most extractors include a "filter neutrals" option that removes colors with very low saturation (grays, near-black, near-white). This leaves only the chromatic colors, which are more useful for building accent palettes. Check the tool's settings for this toggle.

What file formats does the tool support?

The tool accepts JPG, PNG, WebP, and SVG uploads. GIF is supported but only analyzes the first frame. HEIC and raw camera formats (CR2, NEF) are not supported—convert them to JPG or PNG first.

Color Palette Extractor

This tool extracts the dominant colors from any image you upload and returns them as a palette of hex, RGB, and HSL values you can copy directly into your project. Upload a photo, logo, screenshot, or design asset and the tool identifies the most visually significant colors in under a second. The image never leaves your browser. No upload to any server, no account required.

Image source

Upload image

Or image URL

Colors to extractCountry

Ignore near-whiteIgnore near-blackShow color names

Color extraction depends on source image quality and compression. For brand work, verify the final hex values in your design file.

How does the Color Palette Extractor work step by step?

Color extraction starts with pixel sampling. The tool loads your image into a canvas element, reads the pixel data as an array of RGBA values, and optionally downsamples large images to reduce processing time without losing color accuracy. A 4000x3000 photo might be scaled to 800x600 internally—the color distribution remains statistically identical, but analysis runs 25x faster.

What does a typical Color Palette Extractor result look like?

Upload a logo on white background with ignore white enabled. The output keeps the brand colors, removes paper background noise, and gives ready to paste CSS variables.

Frequently asked questions

How many colors should I extract from an image?
Extract 5-8 colors for most use cases. Fewer than 5 misses subtle accent colors. More than 10 includes too many near-duplicates and minor tones. For complex images like paintings, you can increase to 12-15, but most design systems only need a handful of colors.
Can the tool extract colors from gradients accurately?
Yes, but gradients produce multiple extracted colors—one for each distinct stop along the gradient. If your image has a blue-to-purple gradient, the tool will extract blue, purple, and 2-3 intermediate tones. To get the exact gradient endpoints, sample the start and end manually.
Does the extractor work on screenshots of websites?
Yes. Upload a screenshot, and the tool extracts the dominant colors from the UI. This is useful for competitor analysis or recreating a design without access to the original files. Note that text-heavy screenshots may extract background and text colors as dominant, which might not be the brand's accent colors.
How accurate is color extraction compared to manual eyedropper sampling?
Extraction finds the average or most frequent color across many pixels, while an eyedropper samples one exact pixel. Extraction is more representative of the overall image but may not match a specific pixel's exact value. Use extraction for palettes, eyedropper for precision.
Can I exclude white, black, or gray from the extracted palette?
Most extractors include a "filter neutrals" option that removes colors with very low saturation (grays, near-black, near-white). This leaves only the chromatic colors, which are more useful for building accent palettes. Check the tool's settings for this toggle.
What file formats does the tool support?
The tool accepts JPG, PNG, WebP, and SVG uploads. GIF is supported but only analyzes the first frame. HEIC and raw camera formats (CR2, NEF) are not supported—convert them to JPG or PNG first.