Photos are some of the best colour palettes you will ever find, because their colours already live together in real light. Extracting a palette from an image takes a minute. Turning those raw colours into something you can design with takes a little more care. Here is both.
Option 1: Use a free palette extractor
Several free tools pull the dominant colours from an image automatically and give you the hex codes.
- Adobe Color: choose Extract Theme, upload the image, and pick a mood such as Colorful, Bright, Muted or Dark to change which colours it selects.
- Coolors: its image picker suggests a palette and lets you move the sampling points around the photo.
- Canva: its colour palette generator returns a palette from any uploaded photo.
- Figma plugins: several community plugins extract a palette from a selected image right inside your file.
These are fast and good enough for a starting point. The catch is that they choose the colours that cover the most area, which is usually the least interesting part of the photo.
Option 2: Sample colours by hand
Sampling yourself gives you more control.
- Figma: select a fill, open the colour picker and use the eyedropper (press I) over the image.
- Photoshop or Affinity: use the eyedropper with a 5 by 5 average sample size, so a single noisy pixel does not mislead you.
- Mac: the built-in Digital Color Meter app reads any pixel on screen.
- Windows: the free PowerToys Color Picker (Win+Shift+C) does the same.
Sample from the areas that give the image its mood, not just the biggest ones: the light on a face, the one red object, the deep shadow.
Turning raw colours into a usable palette
Five swatches from a photo are not yet a palette. A few adjustments make them work in a design.
- Sort by lightness. Line the colours up from lightest to darkest. You will usually see two or three neutrals and one or two characterful colours.
- Choose the lead. Pick the most distinctive colour as the main or accent colour.
- Calm the neutrals. Desaturate the background colours slightly so they support rather than compete.
- Push the accent. If the accent looks dull on screen, raise its saturation a little. Photos often look more vivid than their sampled pixels.
- Check contrast. Make sure your text colour passes against the background colour. At least 4.5:1 for body text.
- Test it in a layout. Put the colours on a real screen at real proportions. Use the 60-30-10 split from how to find colors that go together.
Where to find good source images
- Film stills and photography sites have strong, intentional colour.
- Your own photos are free to use and personal to you.
- Interfaces and posters you have saved are palettes already applied to design. For websites, get the exact values directly with the method in how to find the colors and fonts used on any website.
Keep the palettes you make
A palette you extracted once and lost is a palette you will extract again. Save the source image with its hex codes in the note. In GetRef, those values become searchable text, so "warm terracotta palette" or a hex code finds the image months later. For using these colours in an interface, see how to choose a color palette for UI.
Common questions
- How do I get a color palette from an image for free?
- Upload the image to a free palette extractor such as Adobe Color (Extract Theme), Coolors or Canva, and it returns the dominant colours with hex codes. You can also sample colours yourself with the eyedropper in Figma, Photoshop or your operating system colour picker.
- Why does the extracted palette look dull?
- Automatic tools pick the most common colours, and most of any photo is shadows, midtones and backgrounds. Keep those as neutrals, then sample the small bright areas yourself for an accent.
- How many colors should I take from an image?
- Five is a good number: two or three neutrals, one main colour and one accent. More than that is usually noise you will not use.
- Can I use a palette from someone else photo?
- Colours themselves are not owned, so building a palette inspired by a photo is normal practice. Reusing the photo itself is a separate question that depends on its licence.
