Color Palette Generator
Extract beautiful color palettes from any image using K-Means clustering. Copy HEX, RGB, HSL — export CSS, Tailwind, JSON, Adobe ASE and more.
lock Your image never leaves your deviceClick, drag & drop, or paste an image
PNG · JPEG · WEBP · GIF · AVIF · BMP · ICO · SVG — max 50MB
Clustering pixels…
palette Extracted Palette
Drag cards to reorder · click edit to fine-tune a color
hub Color Harmonies — based on your first swatch
download Export Palette
code Developer Mode
preview Live Preview
pie_chart Color Distribution
explore Interactive Color Wheel
Click any extracted color to set it as the wheel's base and instantly regenerate harmonies.
opacity Gradient Generator
health_and_safety Accessibility Engine
WCAG contrast for every color pair in your palette, with suggested fixes.
compare_arrows Color Comparison Mode
verified Brand Palette Matching
Approximate colors, for educational comparison only — not affiliated with or endorsed by these brands, and not for trademark or logo use.
history Palette History
share Share Palette
Share URLs encode your palette directly in the link — no server or account needed. Opening the link restores the exact palette.
casino Random Palette Generator
No image? Generate a professional palette instantly from a design category.
Related Image Tools
How Our Color Palette Generator Works
Five steps, entirely inside your browser tab — no server ever sees your image.
Upload or Paste
Drag and drop, click to browse, or paste an image straight from your clipboard.
Local Preprocessing
The image is decoded and downsampled on a <canvas> element, and transparent pixels are filtered out.
Color Clustering
A weighted K-Means algorithm groups similar pixels into clusters and finds each cluster's true center color.
Review & Refine
Lock colors you like, fine-tune hue and lightness, rename swatches, or regenerate with a different mode.
Copy or Export
Copy HEX/RGB/HSL instantly, or export CSS, Tailwind, Figma, Adobe ASE and 10+ other formats.
What Is a Color Palette Generator?
A color palette generator is a tool that analyzes an image and identifies its most representative colors — its dominant colors — so you can reuse them elsewhere. Toolsvy's color palette generator from image does this with color clustering: every pixel in your photo is treated as a point in 3D color space, and a clustering algorithm (K-Means) groups nearby points together and reports the center of each group as one palette color.
Palettes matter because color is rarely chosen one swatch at a time — it's chosen as a system. A logo, a website, an app and a slide deck all need to share the same handful of colors to look like they belong to the same brand. Rather than guessing HEX codes by eye, designers use an image color picker or dominant color extractor to pull an accurate, cohesive palette directly from a photo, screenshot, painting, or existing brand asset — then build UI, illustrations, or marketing material on top of it.
Toolsvy's Color Palette Generator extracts dominant colors from any photo, screenshot or artwork using real K-Means clustering — entirely inside your browser. Copy HEX, RGB, HSL and eight other color formats instantly, or export ready-to-use CSS, Tailwind, SCSS and design-tool palettes. No uploads, no accounts, no limits.
lightbulb TL;DR
- Upload any image to instantly generate a professional color palette — extract dominant colors and copy HEX, RGB or HSL values.
- Build CSS variables and export to Tailwind, Figma, Sketch and Adobe ASE with one click.
- Everything is processed locally in your browser, so your image and colors never leave your device.
Why Designers Use Color Palettes
A consistent palette is what makes a product feel designed rather than assembled.
Branding
Extract a logo or product photo's colors to define a consistent brand palette.
UI Design
Turn a mood-board image into buttons, cards and interface color tokens.
UX & Interaction
Pick accessible foreground/background pairs before wiring up a flow.
Web Design
Generate a website color palette straight from a hero photo or banner.
Presentations
Match slide themes to a client's photography or brand imagery.
Illustration
Lock a reference image's palette so illustrations stay tonally consistent.
Game Art
Extract a concept scene's palette to keep level art and UI in harmony.
Mobile Apps
Export straight to Flutter or Swift color constants for native apps.
Dashboards
Assign distinct, on-brand colors to charts, series and status indicators.
Social Media
Build on-brand templates by pulling colors from your best-performing posts.
Choosing Better Colors
Warm vs. Cool
Warm colors (reds, oranges, yellows) feel energetic and advance toward the viewer; cool colors (blues, greens, purples) feel calm and recede. Toolsvy's Warm and Cool extraction modes bias clustering toward these hue ranges when you want a palette with a specific temperature.
Contrast
Contrast is the perceptual difference between two colors' lightness. High contrast (dark text on a light background) is easy to read; low contrast is easy to miss. The Accessibility Engine section below scores every pair in your palette so you know which combinations actually work.
Hierarchy
Not every color in a palette should be used equally. Pick one dominant color for backgrounds, one strong accent for calls-to-action, and reserve the rest for supporting details — the Live Preview and Live Preview roles in this tool assign primary, secondary and accent colors automatically for exactly this reason.
Visual Balance
A palette feels balanced when saturated accents are used sparingly against calmer neutrals, rather than several equally loud colors competing for attention. The Distribution chart shows exactly how much of your image each color occupies, which is a good proxy for how "loud" a color will feel in a design.
Color Psychology
Color carries association: blue often reads as trustworthy and calm, green as natural or financial growth, red as urgent or passionate, yellow as optimistic. These associations are cultural rather than universal, so treat them as a starting hypothesis to test, not a rule.
Accessibility
A beautiful palette that fails WCAG contrast requirements will exclude real users. Always check text-on-background pairs against the WCAG AA (4.5:1) or AAA (7:1) thresholds before shipping a design — see the Accessibility Guide below.
Understanding Color Models
Every extracted swatch in this tool is converted into all nine formats below.
| Format | Example | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| HEX | #2f6f65 | Base-16 shorthand for RGB, used almost everywhere in CSS and design tools. |
| RGB | rgb(47, 111, 101) | Red, Green, Blue channels from 0–255, mixed additively like light. |
| RGBA | rgba(47, 111, 101, 1) | RGB plus an alpha (opacity) channel from 0–1. |
| HSL | hsl(174, 40%, 31%) | Hue, Saturation, Lightness — the easiest model for humans to reason about. |
| HSV | hsv(174, 58%, 44%) | Hue, Saturation, Value — common in color pickers and painting software. |
| HWB | hwb(174 18% 56%) | Hue, Whiteness, Blackness — a native CSS Color Level 4 format. |
| CMYK | cmyk(58%, 0%, 9%, 56%) | Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key(black) — used for print, mixed subtractively like ink. |
| LAB | lab(41.4, -20.6, 2.1) | Perceptually uniform space: equal numeric distance ≈ equal perceived difference. |
| LCH | lch(41.4, 20.7, 174.1) | LAB expressed as Lightness, Chroma and Hue — easier to tune than raw LAB. |
| XYZ | xyz(12.4, 16.8, 15.1) | The CIE reference space every other color model is ultimately derived from. |
Accessibility Guide: WCAG Contrast Explained
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) define a contrast ratio between 1:1 (identical colors) and 21:1 (pure black on pure white), calculated from each color's relative luminance. Toolsvy's Accessibility Engine computes this ratio for every pair of colors in your palette automatically.
WCAG AA
The minimum standard most sites should meet: a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text, or 3:1 for large text (18pt+, or 14pt+ bold).
WCAG AAA
The enhanced standard: a contrast ratio of at least 7:1 for normal text, or 4.5:1 for large text — recommended for critical or high-traffic interfaces.
For readable buttons: pair your button background against its label color and confirm at least AA (4.5:1). If a button fails, either darken the background or lighten the label — the Accessibility Engine's "Suggested Fix" column does this automatically.
For readable cards: body text on a card background should hit AA at minimum; headings can sometimes get away with the 3:1 large-text threshold if sized 18pt or above.
For accessible interfaces overall: never rely on color alone to convey meaning (use icons or text labels alongside color-coded status), and always test your palette's real contrast ratios rather than trusting how "readable" it looks on your own monitor.
From Palette to Code
The Developer Export Hub above generates all of these automatically — here's what the output looks like.
code CSS Variables
:root {
--ocean-blue: #2f6f65;
--pearl-white: #f5f5f0;
--midnight-navy: #0d1b2a;
}
style Tailwind Config
module.exports = {
theme: {
extend: {
colors: {
'ocean-blue': '#2f6f65',
'pearl-white': '#f5f5f0',
'midnight-navy': '#0d1b2a',
}
}
}
}
smartphone Flutter
class AppColors {
static const Color oceanBlue = Color(0xFF2F6F65);
static const Color pearlWhite = Color(0xFFF5F5F0);
static const Color midnightNavy = Color(0xFF0D1B2A);
}
terminal React Theme Object
export const theme = {
colors: {
oceanBlue: '#2f6f65',
pearlWhite: '#f5f5f0',
midnightNavy: '#0d1b2a',
}
} as const;
Branding Tips: Give Every Color a Job
A resilient brand palette assigns a clear role to each color rather than using them interchangeably.
| Role | Used for |
|---|---|
| Primary | Your main brand color — logo, header, primary buttons. |
| Secondary | Supports the primary color without competing with it — secondary buttons, backgrounds. |
| Accent | A high-saturation color reserved for the one action you most want noticed. |
| Neutral | Grays, whites and near-blacks for text, borders and surfaces. |
| Success | Confirms a completed or positive action — typically green. |
| Warning | Flags something that needs attention but isn't broken — typically amber. |
| Error | Signals failure or a destructive action — typically red. |
| Information | Neutral, non-urgent notices — typically blue. |
Common Color Palette Mistakes
Using Too Many Colors
Most interfaces need 4–6 colors total. Beyond that, extract more but only promote a handful to real UI roles.
Poor Contrast
Light gray text on white looks elegant in a mockup and fails for anyone with low vision or a bright screen outdoors.
Ignoring Accessibility
Contrast checks are not optional polish — they determine whether real users can actually read your interface.
Over-Saturation
Several fully-saturated colors together create visual noise. Let one accent be loud and mute the rest.
Random Palettes
Colors picked without a source image or a system rarely relate to each other in hue, saturation or lightness.
No Hierarchy
If every color is used with equal weight, nothing stands out — assign primary, secondary and accent roles deliberately.
How We Calculate Colors
Preprocessing. The source image is drawn to an off-screen <canvas> and downsampled to a maximum dimension of 48px (Fast), 96px (Balanced) or 160px (Precise) before sampling, which keeps clustering fast without materially changing the dominant colors. Pixels with alpha below 16/255 are discarded so transparent areas don't skew results.
Clustering. Extraction uses K-Means++ seeding (each new starting center is chosen with probability proportional to its squared distance from existing centers, weighted by pixel importance) followed by weighted Lloyd's-iteration refinement — 6 to 16 iterations depending on the selected quality preset. Distance between colors is measured with the redmean formula, a low-cost approximation of human color perception that weights the red, green and blue channels differently depending on their average red level, rather than treating RGB as a naive Euclidean cube.
Smart extraction modes. Before clustering, each pixel is assigned a weight based on its hue, saturation and lightness according to the selected mode (Vibrant, Muted, Pastel, Skin Tone Safe, and so on). This changes which pixels the clustering algorithm treats as important, so the same photo produces meaningfully different palettes depending on your intended use case — not just a re-sorted version of the same colors.
Color space conversions. Every extracted RGB value is converted to HSL, HSV, HWB, CMYK, LAB, LCH and XYZ using standard sRGB-referenced formulas, including the piecewise gamma correction defined by the sRGB specification for LAB/XYZ conversion.
Accessibility math. Contrast ratios use the WCAG 2.x relative luminance formula and the standard (L1 + 0.05) / (L2 + 0.05) contrast equation. Color comparison uses CIE76 Delta-E (Euclidean distance in LAB space) as a fast, broadly-accepted approximation of perceptual color difference.
Performance. On supporting browsers, clustering runs inside a Web Worker so the main thread — and your scrolling, typing and clicking — never freezes, even at the Precise quality setting.
Your Privacy, By Architecture
Palette history and favorites are saved only in your own browser's local storage — never sent anywhere — and can be cleared at any time from your browser settings.
Quick Answers
What is a color palette generator?
A color palette generator analyzes an image and extracts its most dominant colors using clustering, giving you a small set of representative HEX, RGB or HSL colors to reuse in design work.
How do I extract colors from an image?
Upload, drag, or paste an image into Toolsvy's Color Palette Generator, choose how many colors you want, and click Extract Palette — colors appear in seconds.
Can I copy HEX colors?
Yes. Click the copy icon on any swatch to copy its HEX code, or use the palette-wide copy menu for RGB, HSL, CSS variables and more.
Is this tool free?
Yes. Toolsvy's Color Palette Generator is completely free, with no sign-up, no watermark, and no limit on how many palettes you generate.
Does my image upload anywhere?
No. Every pixel is processed locally in your browser using the Canvas API — your image is never uploaded to a server or seen by anyone else.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I generate a color palette from an image?
Is this tool free?
Is my image uploaded to a server?
What image formats are supported?
Can I export CSS variables?
:root { --name: #hex; } block, along with SCSS, LESS and 20+ other framework-specific formats.Can I export Tailwind colors?
theme.extend.colors object with each swatch already named and ready to drop into your config file.What is HEX?
#2f6f65 — and is the most common color format in CSS, design tools and image editors.What is RGB?
rgb(47, 111, 101) is the same color as HEX #2f6f65.