Colour picker and palette extractor
Pull the dominant colours out of any image, or click to sample an exact pixel. Hex and RGB, one tap to copy.
Drop in a photograph, a screenshot or a logo and get its dominant colours as hex codes. Useful for building a palette from a photograph, matching a brand colour you have no spec for, or picking a background that suits an image.
How to use it
- Drop in any image.
- Read off the eight dominant colours, sorted by how much of the image they occupy.
- Click anywhere on the image to sample that exact pixel. Tap a swatch to copy it.
How the palette is worked out
The image is sampled and the colours grouped using median-cut quantisation — the same family of algorithm that produces GIF palettes. It repeatedly splits the set of colours along whichever axis is most spread out, until the required number of groups remains.
The result is a palette that reflects what the image actually looks like, rather than the mathematically most common pixel values. The percentage under each swatch shows how much of the image that colour group covers.
Building a usable palette
A dominant-colour list is raw material, not a finished design system. In practice:
- Take one or two, not eight. Most good palettes are one dominant colour, one accent, and neutrals.
- Check contrast before using it for text. A colour lifted from a photo is rarely readable against white.
- The accent is usually the small percentage. The colour occupying 2% of a photograph is often the interesting one.
Questions
What formats can I read colours from?
Any format Invo opens, including HEIC and camera RAW.
How do I copy a colour?
Tap any swatch and the hex code goes to your clipboard.
Can I sample one specific pixel?
Yes. Click anywhere on the image below the palette.
Why do the colours look different from Photoshop?
Colour management. Invo reads sRGB values as the browser renders them; an editor applying an embedded profile may show slightly different numbers.
Is my image uploaded?
No.