Palette from Image

Drop a photo into the panel above, or click it to choose a file. The image is read once and returned as five colors, ordered by how much of the picture each one covers. Click any hex value to copy it. When a palette is worth keeping, open it in the Color Engine, where the five colors arrive as a starting point you can assign roles to, adjust and build a system from.

Photographs work best when the light is even. A picture taken in flat daylight, or a surface shot straight on, usually gives colors that match what you saw. A photo with a strong cast, a hard shadow or a heavy filter gives you the colors of the photo rather than the colors of the object, which is often useful but rarely what people expect.

The obvious use is pulling a palette out of a reference: an interior, a fabric, a packaging shot, a landscape, a piece of artwork. Instead of guessing at the colors by eye, you get the values the image actually contains, which is a much better starting point for a brand or a page.

The second use is checking your own work against reality. If a product is photographed constantly and its color matters - food, cosmetics, clothing - extracting the palette from a real photo tells you what the audience sees, which is sometimes several steps away from the brand's official value. That gap is worth knowing about before it appears in a campaign.

Reading an image spends the same allowance as generating a palette in Color Engine: 2 generation credits per day on a free account, and a monthly balance on Foundry. Reading takes one credit, and an image that cannot be read is not charged.

Your file is stored privately and used only to find its colors. It is not published, not indexed, and not shown to anyone else.