Extract a palette from any image.

What a palette extractor is for

You have an image — a photograph, a screenshot, a piece of packaging, a frame from a film — and you want the colours out of it as numbers you can paste into a design file. That is the whole job. A palette extractor reads every pixel, groups the ones that are close enough to count as the same colour, and hands you back the handful that describe the picture.

Why the colours you get matter more than how many

Most extractors sample pixels and return whatever turns up most often. On a photograph that is mostly wall, that returns five shades of wall. Palettae over-quantises first and then thins near-duplicates by perceptual distance, so a colour only takes a slot if it is genuinely different from the ones already in the palette — and a small, vivid colour can beat a large, flat one if it carries more of the image.

A palette of five beiges is not a palette. It is the same colour, five times, with different names.

What you get

• HEX, RGB and HSL for every colour, plus CMYK and LAB approximations in the detail panel.
• Prominence — the share of the image each colour accounts for, worked out by assigning every pixel to its nearest palette colour. The percentages add up to 100.
• Contrast checks against the real WCAG 2.1 formula, so you know which pairs can carry text.
• Downloads — PNG, SVG, JSON, CSS custom properties and an ASE file that opens in Illustrator and Photoshop.

How many colours should you extract?

Six is a good default and it is what Palettae starts with. Three gets you the gist of an image and is useful for a quick mood check. Eight or ten is worth it for a busy photograph or when you want tints and shades to build a scale from. If two colours in the result look the same to you, ask for fewer — the palette will spread further apart.

Nothing is uploaded

The extraction runs in your browser. Your image is decoded to a canvas on your own device, analysed there, and never sent to a server. That is not a policy promise, it is how the tool is built — which is also why it is free and why there is no account.