This pulls a palette of several distinct colors out of an image instead of a single swatch. Handy when what you need is the two, four, or eight colors that make up a design, not one blended average of all of them. Processing happens entirely on a canvas in the browser; the image is never sent anywhere.

How the palette is chosen

The image is sampled at a fixed 80×80 resolution and every pixel's color is grouped into buckets, each channel rounded to the nearest step of 32. The buckets are then ranked by how many pixels fall into them. It's the same frequency approach the average/dominant tool uses, extended to keep several top candidates instead of the single winner.

A palette of near-identical shades (several slightly different blues, say) would be useless, so each candidate is only added if it sits at least a minimum RGB distance from every color already picked. That's why the result tends toward distinct colors instead of gradations of the same one.

The slider controls how many colors to extract, from 4 to 12. Raising it won't always fill every slot. Where an image lacks enough sufficiently distinct colors, the extracted list simply comes out shorter.

When you'd use this

Reverse-engineering a color palette from a photo, mockup, or piece of artwork to reuse in a design system, or checking which colors visually dominate a product photo before writing marketing copy around it.

Frequently asked questions