Image Color Palette Generator — Extract HEX, RGB & HSL from Any Photo

What Is an Image Color Palette Generator?

An image color palette generator is a tool that analyzes every pixel in a photo and intelligently groups similar colors to identify the most visually dominant shades. Instead of picking colors manually with an eyedropper, the tool does all the heavy lifting — in seconds.

Whether you are a UI/UX designer building a brand identity system, a web developer setting up a Tailwind CSS theme, a photographer curating a mood board, or a digital artist seeking color inspiration, an image palette generator saves hours of work and gives you precise, reproducible color values you can use directly in your project.

ImageToolo's free palette generator goes further than any basic tool. It uses a weighted pixel quantization algorithm that identifies colors based on both frequency and visual saturation — so you always get the colors that actually define the look and feel of your image, not just the most repeated pixel values.

How to Extract Colors from an Image

Using the tool above is straightforward. Follow these four steps to get your complete color palette in under 30 seconds:

1. Upload your image — Drag and drop any photo (JPEG, PNG, WEBP, GIF, BMP, or SVG) onto the upload area, or click to open the file picker from your device.
2. Choose the number of colors — Use the slider in Settings or the +/– buttons to pick anywhere from 3 to 50 dominant colors. The default is 5, which works well for most brand palettes.
3. Copy, inspect, or refine your colors — Click any color swatch to copy its HEX, RGB, or HSL value. Remove colors you don't need by hovering over a card and clicking the trash icon.
4. Export in the format you need — Download your palette as a PNG image, SVG vector, JSON data file, CSS custom properties file, SCSS variables, or a ready-to-paste Tailwind CSS config.

Key Features of the ImageToolo Palette Generator

This tool is built for professionals who need more than a basic color picker. Here is what makes it one of the most complete free palette generators available online:

Weighted Dominant Color Extraction

Most palette tools pick random pixels or simply count the most frequent color. Our algorithm uses a weighted quantization approach: it groups pixels into clusters and scores each cluster by both its pixel count and its color saturation. This means vibrant, meaningful colors are always surfaced — even when they represent a smaller area of the image.

3 to 50 Colors per Image

Press the + button or drag the slider to extract as many or as few colors as you need. A 3-color brand palette for a minimal logo is just as easy to generate as a 40-color gradient map for data visualization or editorial illustration.

HEX, RGB, and HSL Color Values

Every extracted color is immediately available in all three standard color formats:

• HEX — the six-digit code used in HTML, CSS, Tailwind, Figma, Adobe XD, and most design tools (e.g., #3B82F6).
• RGB — the red, green, blue model used in CSS, canvas APIs, and image processing (e.g., rgb(59, 130, 246)).
• HSL — hue, saturation, and lightness — the most human-readable format, ideal for theme-based design systems that need light and dark variants (e.g., hsl(217, 91%, 60%)).

One click on any value copies it to your clipboard, ready to paste directly into your code editor or design software.

WCAG Accessibility Contrast Scores

Each extracted color is automatically tested against WCAG 2.1 accessibility guidelines and labeled with one of four contrast ratings:

• AAA — contrast ratio above 7:1 (passes for body text, headings, and all UI components)
• AA — contrast ratio above 4.5:1 (passes for normal text on most digital interfaces)
• Large — contrast ratio above 3:1 (acceptable for large text and UI components only)
• Poor — below 3:1 (not recommended for text or interactive elements)

Scores are calculated against both white and black backgrounds so you know at a glance whether a color is safe to use for accessible design before you ever write a single line of code.

Color Harmony Generation

For each extracted color, the tool automatically computes three color harmonies based on color theory:

• Analogous — colors adjacent to each other on the color wheel. These create calm, cohesive, and natural-feeling layouts often seen in nature photography and lifestyle brands.
• Complementary — colors directly opposite on the color wheel. These create maximum contrast and visual tension, making them perfect for call-to-action buttons and attention-grabbing highlights.
• Triadic — three colors evenly spaced 120° apart on the color wheel. These produce vibrant, energetic combinations commonly used in creative and entertainment brand identities.

Nearest Tailwind CSS Class Suggestion

Every extracted color is matched to the closest color in the Tailwind CSS v3 default palette. You'll see the suggested class name (for example, blue-500 or emerald-700) directly on the color card, so you can reference the right Tailwind token instantly without hunting through documentation.

Live Design System Mockup Preview

After extraction, switch to the Mockup tab to see how your palette looks applied to a real landing page layout — with a hero section, buttons, typography, cards, and a navigation bar. This interactive preview lets you validate your color choices in real UI context before you commit to a design direction.

6 Export Formats

Once your palette is ready, you can export it in six different formats to match exactly what your workflow requires:

1. PNG — A clean palette image with labeled color swatches and their HEX codes. Ideal for client presentations, mood boards, and design documentation.
2. SVG — Scalable vector color swatches, fully editable in Figma, Illustrator, Inkscape, or any vector design tool.
3. JSON — Structured data containing each color's HEX, RGB, and HSL values. Useful for programmatic integration into design systems, APIs, or build pipelines.
4. CSS — Ready-to-use CSS custom properties (variables) and utility classes. Drop directly into your stylesheet and start using palette colors by name across your entire project.
5. SCSS — Sass variables and a $palette-map for projects using SCSS preprocessing. Integrates smoothly with component libraries and existing SCSS architectures.
6. Tailwind Config — A complete tailwind.config.js extension block with your palette colors as a named theme extension. Paste it into your project and use your colors as Tailwind utility classes immediately.

Palette History — Save Up to 10 Palettes

The tool automatically saves your last 10 generated palettes in your browser's local storage. You can return to any previous session, reload a saved palette, and continue where you left off — without needing an account or cloud storage. Everything stays local on your device.

100% Private — No Server Upload

Your images are processed entirely within your browser using the HTML5 Canvas API and JavaScript. No image data, pixel information, or file contents are ever sent to any server. This means complete privacy for confidential client work, private photography, or proprietary brand assets.

Who Uses an Image Color Palette Generator?

Palette extraction from images is a fundamental task across many creative and technical disciplines:

• Brand designers use it to build consistent brand color systems inspired by real-world references like product photography, interior shots, or lifestyle imagery.
• Web developers use it to quickly generate CSS variables and Tailwind config tokens from a client-supplied mood board or reference image, saving hours of manual color selection.
• UI/UX designers use it to validate color contrast accessibility (WCAG) early in the design process and ensure that the visual palette meets digital accessibility standards.
• Digital artists and illustrators use it to study the color relationships in reference artwork and apply similar palettes to their own compositions.
• Photographers use it to develop consistent color grading presets by analyzing the dominant tones in a curated set of reference photos.
• Marketing teams use it to ensure that campaign visuals, social media graphics, and email templates stay on-brand by checking color consistency against the official brand palette.
• Data visualization engineers use it to build perceptually meaningful, aesthetically cohesive color scales for charts, maps, and dashboards without relying on generic default palettes.

Understanding Color Formats: HEX vs RGB vs HSL

Each of the three formats this tool provides serves a different use case. Understanding when to use each one will help you work faster and avoid conversion errors:

HEX Color Codes

Hexadecimal color codes are the most widely recognized format in web design. Represented as a pound sign followed by six characters (e.g., #FF6B6B), HEX codes translate directly into red, green, and blue values in base-16. Use HEX when copy-pasting into HTML/CSS, Figma, Sketch, Adobe tools, or Tailwind configurations.

RGB Color Values

RGB (Red, Green, Blue) expresses color as three integers from 0 to 255 (e.g., rgb(255, 107, 107)). It maps directly to how screens produce color and is useful in programmatic contexts — for example, when using the Canvas API, processing images in Node.js or Python, or setting colors dynamically through JavaScript.

HSL Color Values

HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) is the most human-readable color format (e.g., hsl(0, 100%, 71%)). The hue value (0–360) represents the color's position on the color wheel. Saturation controls intensity, and lightness determines how light or dark the color appears. HSL is ideal for building flexible design tokens — you can easily generate lighter or darker variants by adjusting only the lightness value, which is how most modern design systems manage color scales.

What Makes a Good Color Palette?

Not every set of colors extracted from an image automatically makes a great design palette. Here are the principles that separate a professional palette from a random color dump:

• Visual hierarchy — A strong palette includes at least one dominant (primary) color, one supporting (secondary) color, and one neutral. Too many dominant colors fight for attention.
• Sufficient contrast — Text and interactive elements must meet WCAG AA contrast requirements (at minimum) to be usable for all audiences, including those with visual impairments.
• Emotional coherence — Colors evoke feelings. Warm tones (reds, oranges, yellows) suggest energy and urgency. Cool tones (blues, teals, greens) communicate trust and calm. A good palette tells a consistent emotional story.
• Limited palette size — For most brand and UI projects, 4 to 7 colors is optimal. Too few colors can feel restrictive; too many creates visual noise and inconsistency.
• Neutral foundation — Almost every professional design palette includes at least one near-white and one near-black or very dark neutral for backgrounds, text, and borders.

Tips for Getting the Best Results

The quality of your extracted palette depends significantly on the image you choose. These tips will help you get the most accurate and useful results:

• Use well-lit, high-contrast images with distinct color regions. Flat, desaturated images naturally produce dull palettes.
• For brand or UI palettes, start with product photography or brand imagery rather than stock photos, to ensure the extracted colors reflect the actual brand identity.
• Increase the color count when working with complex scenes (landscapes, editorial photography) to capture the full tonal range.
• Use the remove feature (trash icon on hover) to eliminate background whites, shadows, or skin tones that may not be relevant to your palette needs.
• Check the WCAG scores before finalizing any color for text or interactive use. A beautiful color that fails accessibility checks creates legal and usability risks in digital products.

Image Color Palette Generator vs Manual Color Picking

Manual color selection — using an eyedropper tool in Photoshop, Figma, or a browser DevTools extension — is precise but slow and subjective. You can only sample one color at a time, and it is easy to miss the most statistically prominent colors if you focus on a visually interesting but small region of the image.

An automated palette generator analyzes the entire image simultaneously, weighing every pixel to produce an objective representation of the most dominant colors. It removes the guesswork, produces consistent results every time, and delivers all color formats instantly — no manual conversion requried.

The best approach is to use both: use the generator to get your foundational palette, then refine individual shades manually in your design tool to meet exact brand or accessibility requirements.

Related Tools on ImageToolo

If you work with image colors regularly, these other free tools on ImageToolo will complement your workflow:

• Image Color Picker — Click anywhere on a photo to sample an exact color and get its HEX, RGB, and HSL values instantly.
• Image Metadata Viewer — Extract EXIF data, GPS coordinates, camera settings, and technical details embedded in any photo.
• Image Format Converter — Convert between JPEG, PNG, WEBP, and other image formats directly in your browser, no upload required.