FAQ
Questions, answered.
If something here does not match what the tool does, the tool is right and this page is wrong — tell us.
- Is Palettae free?
- Yes. Palettae is free and supported by advertising. There is no account, no trial and no paid tier. The tool costs almost nothing to run because the work happens on your own computer, which is what makes free sustainable rather than temporary.
- Are my images stored?
- No — and in almost every case they are never even sent. When you upload, drag, paste or load the example, your image is decoded and analysed inside your browser tab. It is not uploaded, so there is nothing to store. The single exception is the optional image URL field: to fetch a URL we have to make the request from our server, and that image passes through it on the way to you. It is not written to disk and not kept.
- How many colours can I extract?
- Three, five, six, eight or ten. Six is the default. If an image genuinely holds fewer distinct colours than you asked for, you get fewer — Palettae will not pad a palette out with near-duplicates to hit a number.
- Can I copy HEX values?
- Click anywhere on a swatch and its hex is on your clipboard. Use Copy palette for all of them at once, as plain hex, as rgb() values, or as CSS custom properties. The detail panel adds HSL, an approximate CMYK, LAB, and the nearest named CSS colour.
- Can I use Palettae for branding?
- Yes. Colours themselves are not something anyone owns, and there is no licence on what comes out of the tool. Do bear in mind that the colours in a photograph are affected by the light it was shot in and by the screen you are looking at it on, so a palette pulled from a photo is a starting point for a brand rather than a finished specification. If you are matching an existing brand, work from its own assets and check the result in the software you will produce artwork in.
- Can I pick a specific colour from an image?
- Yes. Turn on Pick a color from the image and move over the picture — the hex follows your pointer. Click or tap to add it to the palette. On a phone the preview sits above your fingertip so it is not hidden underneath it. See the image colour picker.
- Can I download my palette?
- PNG, SVG, JSON, CSS and ASE — the last of which opens directly in Illustrator and Photoshop. There is also a 1080 × 1350 palette card with a crop of your image, sized for Instagram and Pinterest. All of them are drawn in your browser, so nothing is uploaded to produce them.
- Does Palettae use AI?
- No AI is required to extract your palette. Palettae analyzes the colors in the image directly. It counts the colours, clusters them with median cut — an algorithm from the 1980s that image editors have used ever since — and removes near-duplicates by perceptual distance. There is no model and no API call anywhere in the tool, including the palette names, which come from a hand-written list.
- Why did I get a colour I cannot see in my image?
- Usually because it is a blend. A palette colour is the average of a cluster of similar pixels, so a photograph with a lot of edges between two colours will produce the colour in between them. If that is not what you want, ask for more colours — the clusters get tighter — or use the picker to take the exact colour from the spot you mean.
- What file types work, and how big can they be?
- JPG, PNG, WEBP, GIF and AVIF, up to 20MB. Transparent PNGs work properly: see-through pixels are skipped rather than counted as whatever is behind them. Very large images are scaled down before analysis, which does not change the palette and makes it much faster.
- Do the percentages really add up to 100?
- Yes. After the palette is chosen, every pixel in the image is assigned to whichever palette colour it is closest to, and the percentages come from those counts. Add or remove a colour and they are worked out again, because the palette changed.
- Does it work on a phone?
- Yes, including the picker — tap or drag on the image to sample it. Copy, reorder and every download work the same as on a desktop. If dragging a swatch to reorder is awkward on a touchscreen, each swatch also has plain move-earlier and move-later buttons.
Drop an image in. Get the palette.
Pull the colors out