MyColorTools
MyColorTools → Color palette generator
Color palette generator — from a photo, or from a single color
Drop in a photograph and pull out the colors that actually make it work. Or start from one color and let the harmonies, tints, shades and tones build the rest around it. Every swatch comes named, with its HEX code, ready to export.
Open the palette generator →Six colors is usually the sweet spot: a dominant, a secondary, an accent and a few neutrals.
Extracting a palette from a photo
Upload an image — or drag it onto the page — and choose Extract palette. The image is reduced to a manageable size, then split repeatedly along its widest color axis until the requested number of buckets remain, and each bucket's average becomes a swatch. That is median-cut quantisation, and it is the reason the result reflects what is actually in the picture instead of a handful of pixels that happened to be sampled.
Each swatch arrives with a name, a HEX code and the share of the image it covers, so you can tell a genuine dominant color from a small bright one that merely caught your eye. Drop the ones you do not want before saving.
The whole thing runs in your browser. The photo is never uploaded, which matters more than it sounds — palette extractors are routinely pointed at unreleased artwork, client photography and personal pictures.
Photos that extract well
- A clear subject and background. Busy scenes give muddy averages, because that is genuinely what is there.
- Good light. Heavy shadow compresses everything toward black, and the palette shows it.
- Crop first. Extraction looks at the whole frame, so cropping to the part you care about is the most effective control you have over the result.
Building a palette from one color
The other direction: pick a base color and let the relationships generate the rest. The explorer gives you a hue wheel, a lightness slider and a hex field, and updates everything live as you move.
| Scheme | What it is | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Complementary | The hue opposite, 180° away | Maximum contrast — accents, calls to action |
| Analogous | Neighbours, ±30° | Calm, cohesive schemes that stay out of the way |
| Triadic | Three hues, 120° apart | Vivid and balanced — illustration, playful brands |
| Split-complementary | The two hues either side of the complement | Contrast without the tension of a straight complement |
| Tetradic | Two complementary pairs | Rich schemes — needs one clear dominant to hold together |
Alongside the hue relationships, three ramps do the quieter work:
- Tints — the base mixed toward white. Backgrounds, hover states.
- Shades — mixed toward black. Text, borders, depth.
- Tones — mixed toward grey. The step most people skip, and the one that stops a palette shouting.
A practical build: one base, one complement or analogous partner as the accent, then three tints and three shades of the base as the working neutrals. That is nine values, and it will carry an entire interface.
Checking a palette before you commit to it
Two checks that save rework later:
- Contrast. Every color reports its ratio against white and black. Body text needs 4.5:1 for WCAG AA, large text 3:1, and AAA asks for 7:1. A palette that fails here is a palette you will be patching for the life of the product.
- Color vision. Run it through the colorblind simulator on Simulate it at deutan 100% — that is the direction that reproduces the deficiency. (Correct for me is the opposite filter, for viewers who have it; it separates colors rather than merging them, so it will not show you this.) If two swatches you rely on telling apart collapse into one, they need a difference in lightness — not just hue — before they ship.
The lightness test. Convert your palette to grayscale in your head, or simply look at the L value in the CIELAB readout. If several swatches share a lightness, anything distinguished by them alone is invisible to a large group of people — and in a photocopy, and in bright sun.
Saving and exporting
Palettes are stored on your device and stay there between visits. Rename them, remove individual colors, or tap any swatch to open it back up in the identifier and explorer.
- PNG — a swatch strip, for sending to somebody or dropping into a doc.
- JSON — name, HEX and RGB for every color, for pulling into your own tooling.
- Export all — every palette in a single JSON file, as a backup.
There are no accounts, so there is no sync — export the JSON if you want the palettes somewhere else, or want them to survive clearing your browser data.
Frequently asked
How many colors should a palette have?
Five or six for anything you have to build with. A dominant, a secondary, an accent and two or three neutrals will carry a whole interface, and every extra color is one more thing to keep consistent. Mood boards are the exception — there you are cataloguing, not committing.
Can I use a screenshot instead of a photo?
Yes. Screenshots extract particularly cleanly, since they usually contain flat, deliberate colors — which makes this a quick way to read the palette out of a design you admire.
Is it free?
Yes, with no account and no limit on how many palettes you keep. The site is funded by optional donations and by shopping links marked #ad.
Does it work offline?
Once loaded, yes. Extraction, naming, harmony and export all run locally — there is no server to be offline from.
The rest of the toolkit
- Color identifierName any color from your camera or a photo, with full readouts.
- Colorblind simulatorCheck a palette against protan, deutan and tritan vision.
- LAB space explorerSee where a color sits among all the named ones, in three dimensions.