Pick a colour off any image.

Picking one colour, not a palette

Sometimes you do not want six colours. You want the exact green of one leaf, or the blue in a logo you have a screenshot of. Add your image, turn on Pick a color from the image, and move the pointer over it — the HEX follows your cursor. Click and it joins the palette, where you can copy it in any format.

How to use it

1. Drop in an image, paste one from your clipboard, or click to upload.
2. Press Pick a color from the image.
3. Move over the image. On a phone, drag your finger — the preview sits above your fingertip so it is never underneath it.
4. Tap or click to keep the colour. Click the swatch to copy its HEX.

Why the colour is averaged

A single pixel from a compressed photograph is often a JPEG artefact rather than the colour you were pointing at — a stray dark speck in the middle of a red coat. Palettae averages a small neighbourhood around your pointer instead, which gives you the colour a person would say is there. On a flat graphic or a screenshot, where every pixel in a region is identical, this changes nothing.

What you can do with a picked colour

• Copy its HEX with one click, or open the detail panel for RGB, HSL, CMYK and LAB.
• See the nearest named CSS colour, if you need a name rather than a number.
• Check whether black or white text is readable on it — worked out, not guessed.
• Keep it alongside the extracted colours and download the lot together.

A note on the system eyedropper

Some browsers have a native eyedropper that can sample anywhere on your screen, including outside the page. Palettae’s picker works on the image you added, in every browser, and adds what it finds straight to a palette you can export. They are useful for different things.