Color Palette Extractor

Pulling a palette out of an image

This analyses the whole picture and returns the colours that dominate it, rather than the single colour under your cursor. That distinction matters: a photograph contains thousands of distinct pixel values, and what you usually want is the handful that define its overall feel. Designers use it to build a scheme from a photograph, match a layout to an image it will sit beside, or reverse engineer the palette of a design they admire.

Turning extracted colours into a usable scheme

An extracted palette is raw material, not a finished design. Colours pulled from a photograph are often too close in lightness to work together as text and background, and there are usually too many of them. Pick one as your dominant colour, one as an accent, and hold the rest back. A scheme with two confident colours and plenty of neutral space almost always beats one using five extracted colours at once.

Check contrast before you commit

• Two colours can look distinct and still fail contrast requirements for text.
• Aim for a 4.5 to 1 ratio for body text against its background.
• Extracted colours often need lightening or darkening before they are usable for text.
• If you want one specific pixel rather than the overall palette, the Image Color Picker is the right tool.