About Color Palette Extractor
Pull a colour palette out of any image in your browser. Designers do this when they want to match a brand to a hero photo; developers do it when they need accent colours for a UI; everyone does it occasionally because something just looked good and they want to know why. SnapToolz' Palette Extractor uses median-cut quantisation — the same algorithm PNG quantization is built on — to find the 4-10 most representative colours. Click any swatch to copy its HEX, RGB, or HSL value, or download the whole palette as a PNG strip. Runs entirely on your device.
- No uploads
- Browser-only
- Works offline
- 100% free
How it works
- 1
Drop your image
JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF or AVIF. The image is downscaled to 200 px on its longest edge for fast processing.
- 2
Choose palette size
4 colours for a tight brand palette, 6 for hero images, 8-10 for richly-coloured photographs.
- 3
Copy or download
Click any swatch to copy its hex; or click the RGB / HSL value below for those formats. Download a PNG strip for design specs.
Related tools
Browse allFrequently asked questions
Are my files uploaded to a server?
No. Every tool on SnapToolz runs entirely inside your browser using JavaScript and WebAssembly. Your file is read locally, processed in memory, and the result is offered as a download. Nothing is sent to a server — there isn't one to send to.
How is the palette computed?
Median-cut quantisation. The image is downsampled to 200 px on the longest edge, the pixels are bucketed into k regions of similar colour by repeated splitting along the channel with greatest variance, and each bucket's mean colour is returned. Same algorithm used by PNG quantization, ImageMagick, and most native palette tools.
Why not k-means clustering?
K-means produces similar results but is non-deterministic (different random initialisations give different palettes) and slower on large images. Median-cut is repeatable: drop the same photo twice and you get the same palette.
Can I get a complementary palette?
Not directly — the tool returns the dominant colours in the source image, not derived palettes. For complementary / triadic / analogous colours, use the HSL output and rotate the hue manually (or paste the result into a colour theory tool).
What does 'ignore near-black / near-white' do?
Strips heavy white backgrounds (slide decks, product shots) and dark UI chrome from the input before quantisation. Useful when the background colour would otherwise dominate the palette.
Does it work offline?
Yes. SnapToolz is a Progressive Web App. After your first visit, the app is cached on your device and every tool keeps working without an internet connection.
Is SnapToolz free?
Yes — every tool is 100% free with no sign-up, no watermark, no hidden tier. The whole platform is open source and we have no plan to gate features.