OnSumoTools

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

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.

Related tools

Pull a palette from a picture

A good photo already has a color scheme. Sunsets, product shots, a logo. This tool reads an image and returns its dominant colors in HEX, RGB and HSL, each with the nearest color name and a CSS variable you can paste into your stylesheet.

The image is processed in your browser. It's never uploaded.

How many colors

Five to eight is usually enough. More than that and you're collecting near-duplicates. Fewer and you lose accents. Start with six and adjust.

Images with big flat areas produce clean palettes. Busy photos produce muddy ones, because the tool averages similar pixels together.

Screenshots and gradients

Website screenshots work well, but remember that browser chrome or white margins count as pixels. Crop first. Gradients give you a few steps along the blend, not every shade, which is usually what you want.

Extraction is faster than an eyedropper, though a manual pick is more exact for one specific spot. Use extraction to find candidates, then fine-tune.

Whites, blacks and grays

These often dominate a photo and push interesting colors down the list. If the result is mostly gray, try cropping the background or using a larger count so accents appear.

Formats and next steps

JPG, PNG, WebP and most common formats work. Very large files are scaled down first for speed.

After extracting, check text contrast with the WCAG checker. A palette from a lovely photo can still fail at readability.

Starting from a photo

A good photo already has a balanced palette. Pull the dominant colors from a product shot, a logo or a scenery shot, and you get a set that works together because it already did.

Pick one dominant color as your brand or accent color, one or two supporting tones and a neutral. Use the lightest and darkest colors for backgrounds and text, checking contrast as you go.

Turning colors into a system

Copy the values as CSS variables and name them by role, not by hue: primary, surface, text, accent. If you rebrand later, you change one file.

Check the extracted colors against text. A pretty mid-tone often fails contrast on white. Use the contrast checker, then adjust lightness until it passes.

The image stays in your browser and isn't uploaded.

Using the extracted colors

Don't use every swatch. Pick one for the main brand color, one or two for accents and one light and one dark neutral. Five colors is plenty for most sites.

Check text contrast on each pairing with the WCAG checker. A color that looks great in the photo can fail as a button background.

Save the result as CSS variables with names that describe their job, like --color-primary and --color-surface, not their look. If you change the brand later, one edit updates the page.

Try a few images before you settle. A product shot, a logo and a photo of your team will give you quite different sets, and the best one often isn't the first.