Color Palette Generator from Image — Free Online

Steal like a designer: palettes from real images

Some of the best color schemes ever used on the web were not invented in a design tool — they were extracted from photographs. A sunset, a vintage poster, a product shot: nature and photography balance color in ways that are hard to improvise. This tool turns any image into a ready-to-use palette in seconds. Drop a picture in, choose 5, 8 or 12 colors, and you get a grid of swatches with hex codes you can click to copy straight into your CSS, Figma file or brand guide.

How median-cut extraction works

Under the hood the tool uses the median-cut algorithm, the same quantization technique that powered classic GIF encoders. Your image is first downscaled (fast and effectively a gentle blur that removes noise), then its pixels are treated as points in three-dimensional RGB space. The algorithm repeatedly finds the box of pixels with the widest color range and splits it in half along that channel at the median. When the requested number of boxes is reached, each box is averaged into one representative color. The result is a palette that genuinely reflects the image — dominant hues get more slots, rare accent colors still appear, and outlier noise is smoothed away.

Need one exact pixel instead?

Sometimes you do not want a statistical summary — you want that exact blue from the logo. Click the pick button: on browsers that support the EyeDropper API, a native magnifier lets you sample any pixel on screen. Everywhere else, the tool switches to a crosshair mode where clicking the image reads the precise pixel under your cursor from the full-resolution canvas. The picked color is displayed with both hex and RGB values and copied automatically.

Practical uses

Web designers extract palettes from client photos to build cohesive landing pages. Developers generate placeholder color schemes for image-heavy layouts. Artists study how photographers balance warm and cool tones. Social media managers match post graphics to campaign imagery. And because the whole pipeline — decode, downscale, quantize, copy — runs inside your browser, you can safely extract colors from unreleased product shots, client material or personal photos without sending them anywhere.