Tools
Tools for people who work in color
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A colour palette pulled from an image is a set of numbers, and numbers travel well. The trouble starts when one of those numbers has to become paint on a wall, thread in a napkin, or ink on a card, because none of those things are made of light and a screen is. Every tool below exists to close some part of that gap.
None of it is required to use the extractor, which is free and runs in your browser. This page is for the part that comes after: the point where a palette stops being a screenshot and starts costing money.
Get it right
Color reference
For when the screen and the print disagree.
A hex code is a number, and a number is exact. What it is exact about is light leaving a screen, which is not the same thing as ink sitting on paper or pigment mixed into a tin. The same #C25A4F is a warm terracotta on a calibrated monitor, a duller brick on an uncalibrated one, and something else again once it is printed. Nothing here is broken when that happens. The two are different media and they have different ranges.
That is what physical reference is for. A fan deck gives you a colour you can carry to a printer, a supplier or a client and point at. A calibrator makes your own screen agree with everyone else's, which matters most when you are handing a palette to someone who will never see your monitor. A wheel is the cheapest way to sanity check whether the colours you pulled actually relate to each other.
Printed color swatch guide
A physical fan deck to check colors against real ink.
See options on Amazon
Make things
Studio
For turning a palette into actual work.
Extracting a palette takes a second. Using it is the rest of the job, and the useful tools for that part are unglamorous: something to draw with, something to draw on, and enough colours in hand to test an idea before committing to it.
Sketching a palette by hand is worth more than it sounds. Laying six colours down on paper shows you the proportions, which a row of equal-width swatches on a screen hides completely. A palette that looks balanced as six identical bars can be overwhelming once one of those colours is doing eighty percent of the work.
Mixed media sketchbook
Takes markers, paint and pencil without bleeding through.
See options on Amazon
In the real world
Home, events and brands
For planners, decorators and small business owners.
This is where a palette meets a surface that costs money to get wrong. A wall, a run of napkins, a print order, a storefront sign. The screen is a proposal; the wall is the commitment.
The rule that saves the most money is to test at full size and in the room's own light. A colour chip held up next to a window reads differently from the same colour on the shaded wall opposite, and both read differently again at night under a warm bulb. Large peel and stick samples exist because small paper chips reliably mislead.
Peel and stick paint samples
Try a wall color at full size before you buy the gallon.
See options on Amazon
The method
Taking a palette off the screen
Four steps, in order. Most of the expensive mistakes happen at the third one.
- Pull the palette and keep the hex codes. Extract from the image you are actually working from, not a screenshot of it. A screenshot has been resized and recompressed, and both of those shift colour slightly.
- Decide which colour is doing the most work. A palette is not six equal colours. One of them is the ground, one or two carry the accents, and the rest are support. Getting this wrong is the most common reason a good palette looks wrong once it is used.
- Find the nearest physical match, then check it in place. Match against a fan deck or a paint matching tool rather than by eye off a screen. Then look at the sample on the surface it is going on, in that room's own light, at the size it will actually be.
- Check the pairs you intend to put text on. Two colours that look fine side by side can be unreadable when one is type on the other. Run them through a contrast checker before anything goes to print.
The last step has a tool on this site: the contrast checker measures a text colour against its background, and building an accessible palette covers what the numbers mean.
Questions
Colour, on and off a screen
- Why does my palette look different when it is printed?
- A screen makes colour out of light and a printer makes it out of ink, and the two cover different ranges. Saturated blues and greens are the usual casualties: a screen can show a blue that no CMYK ink mix can reach, so the printer substitutes the nearest one it has. Checking against a printed fan deck before the job goes out is the cheapest way to see that coming.
- Do I need a monitor calibrator to pick colours?
- Not to pick them. A hex code is a number and it does not change. You need one when other people have to see what you saw, or when you are judging a colour by eye rather than by its value, because an uncalibrated screen can be noticeably warm, cool or dark without ever looking wrong on its own.
- What is the difference between a fan deck and a digital swatch?
- A digital swatch is a value. A fan deck is that value already made out of real ink, usually with a code a supplier recognises. The deck is what you carry to a printer, a decorator or a fabric supplier when the point is to agree on one specific colour rather than describe it.
- How do I match a paint colour to a photograph?
- Extract the palette from the photograph, decide which of its colours is the one you actually want on the wall, then match that hex against a paint deck or with a colour matching tool. Test it as a large sample on the wall itself, in that room's light, rather than judging a small chip in your hand.
- Is Palettae free to use?
- Yes. The extractor is free, runs entirely in your browser and needs no account. This page carries Amazon affiliate links, which is part of how the site pays for itself.
Keep reading
HEX vs RGB vs HSL explains which notation to reach for when you are adjusting a colour rather than recording it. Extracting colours from a logo is the one to read if the palette has to match a brand that already exists, and how many colours a brand palette needs is about knowing when to stop.
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