Design · 3 min read
Extracting a Colour Palette from an Image
A photo you love is a ready-made colour scheme. Picking colours from images — one pixel at a time or as an automatic palette — is a fast way to make a design feel cohesive with its imagery.
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Picking a single colour
A colour picker reads the exact pixel under the cursor. Photos are noisy, so neighbouring pixels can differ a lot; averaging a small area gives a more representative colour than a single pixel.
How palettes are extracted
Palette extractors group similar pixels together — usually with a clustering method such as k-means or median cut — and report the centre of each group. The biggest groups are the dominant colours.
Dominant is not always best
The most common colour in a photo is often a dull background — sky, wall, or shadow. A useful palette also includes a smaller, vivid accent. Pick one or two neutrals for backgrounds and text, and one accent for buttons and highlights, then check contrast.