Color Picker & Palette Extractor
Upload any PNG or JPEG image, extract a dominant color palette, and inspect colors in HEX, RGB, and HSL. Click directly on the image to sample pixels, copy color values, and export your palette as a branded PNG strip or JSON metadata.
Choose a PNG or JPEG image to begin extracting a palette.
All processing happens in your browser. Images are never uploaded.
Color Palette
Palette
Extract a palette to see the dominant colors from your image. The largest swatches represent the most common colors.
Exports include subtle LifeHackToolbox branding in the PNG and metadata in the JSON.
Extract colors from any image
This color picker and image color extractor lets you turn any PNG or JPEG into a reusable color palette in just a few clicks. Instead of guessing colors by eye or manually sampling pixels in a heavyweight design tool, you can drop an image onto this page, extract its dominant colors, and immediately see their HEX, RGB, and HSL values. The extracted palette appears as a grid of swatches so you can compare relative hues, saturation, and brightness at a glance.
Under the hood, the tool uses a hidden canvas to analyze thousands of pixels and cluster them into a set of representative colors. You can choose how many colors you want (from 3 to 12), which is perfect for everything from minimal branding palettes to richer UI themes. The heaviest colors in the image appear first, and each swatch shows its approximate frequency so you know which tones dominate the source.
How to use the color picker
To get started, click the upload field at the top of the tool and select a PNG or JPEG image from your device. Once the preview loads, the image is drawn onto an off-screen canvas ready for analysis. Use the color count slider to choose how many colors you want in your palette and click Extract palette. Within a moment, the tool runs a simple clustering algorithm to identify the dominant colors and displays them as clickable swatches.
You can click any swatch to make it the active selection, or you can click directly on the image preview to pick the exact color of a pixel. When you click the image, the tool reads the pixel's color via the canvas and updates the selected swatch, giving you a precise HEX to RGB and HEX to HSL conversion. This makes it easy to grab a specific highlight, a brand color, or a subtle background tone that might not be among the most common palette entries.
HEX, RGB, and HSL explained
Designers and developers frequently move between different color formats. HEX codes like #1F2933 are compact and widely used in CSS, design tools, and style guides. RGB values such as rgb(31, 41, 51) make it clear how much red, green, and blue a color contains. HSL values like hsl(210, 25%, 16%) describe a color by its hue, saturation, and lightness, which is often more intuitive when building a cohesive palette.
In this color palette generator, every swatch shows all three formats at once. When you select a color, you can copy the HEX, RGB, or HSL string with a single click. This is especially useful when you are moving between design tools and code—copy HEX values into your design system, drop RGB or HSL into your CSS, and keep a text snippet of your palette for documentation or collaboration.
Why designers use palette extractors
A high-quality palette extractor is a powerful aid for branding, UI design, illustration, and data visualization. When you find a photograph, painting, or screenshot with colors you love, a good tool can reverse engineer that look into a structured set of swatches. From there you can identify a primary brand color, pick supporting accent tones, and choose neutral grays that complement the rest of the palette.
Because this image color extractor shows a frequency percentage for each swatch, you can quickly see which colors dominate and which are better suited as accents. This helps you avoid overusing intense highlight colors or accidentally basing your design on a rare pixel that doesn't actually represent the overall feel of the image.
Exporting palettes as PNG and JSON
Once you're happy with your palette, you can export it in two useful ways. The PNG palette export creates a high-resolution image strip or grid of your colors, wrapped in a subtle LifeHackToolbox-branded frame. This is perfect for dropping into presentations, mood boards, or documentation. Because the tool uses a client-side canvas capture, the PNG is rendered entirely in your browser without uploading the original image.
The JSON palette export is designed for developers and power users. The JSON includes metadata such as the number of colors, the original image dimensions, generation timestamp, and a list of colors with HEX, RGB, HSL, and relative frequency. You can use this JSON in your own color palette generator, design handoff tools, or build custom scripts that synchronize palettes across multiple projects.
Privacy: everything runs in your browser
Like all tools in LifeHackToolbox, this color picker and palette extractor is 100% client-side. The images you upload never leave your device; they are drawn into a hidden canvas solely for pixel analysis and are not sent to any server. Preferences such as your preferred number of palette colors are stored in your browser's localStorage so the tool remembers your settings without creating an account.
If you're building a workflow around design and development, this tool pairs well with other visual and technical helpers in LifeHackToolbox. For example, you can combine it with the Unit Circle Calculator for trigonometry visualizations, the Binary / Decimal / Hex / Octal Converter for working with color values in code, or the Universal Unit Converter when you need to switch between units while designing. Every tool is free, fast, and focused on solving one problem well.