Colour Palette Extractor
Drop in a wallpaper or photo and pull out the colours that actually define it — as hex and HSL, ready to paste into a design tool. Click any swatch to copy it.
🔒 Your image is read directly in your browser. It is never uploaded or stored anywhere.
What it's doing
The tool shrinks your image to a manageable size, then groups its pixels into colour buckets using a median-cut algorithm — the same idea early GIF encoders used to reduce a photo to 256 colours. The buckets with the most pixels become your palette, sorted by how much of the image they cover. The suggested accent favours a colour that's both common and saturated, which is roughly what Android's Material You picks when it themes your system from a wallpaper.
If you want to understand why some of these palettes will sit comfortably behind your app icons and others will fight them, the colour-theory guide walks through hue, saturation and value and the 60-30-10 rule in plain language.
Where this palette and Material You disagree
The accent suggested above is a good guess at what Android will pick, not a prediction. Material You runs its own extraction on the wallpaper, then pushes the result through a tonal-palette generator that adjusts the hue for contrast and accessibility before it reaches your quick settings. It also samples the whole image as the system will crop it, which is not necessarily the framing you uploaded here.
In practice the two agree closely on images with one obvious dominant colour, and diverge on two kinds of picture: photographs where a large flat sky or wall outvotes the actual subject, and low-saturation images where several near-grey buckets are almost tied and a small shift decides the winner. If your phone keeps choosing a colour you did not expect, one of those two is usually why.
What to do with the numbers
Hex values are for pasting into a design tool. The HSL values are more useful for judgement: the third number, lightness, tells you immediately whether a colour will support white text or black text, and the second, saturation, tells you whether it will read as an accent or as a background. A palette whose top three colours all sit within about fifteen points of lightness of each other will look flat behind an icon grid no matter how pleasant the hues are, because there is nothing for the icons to separate from.
The usual failure is not an ugly palette but an unbalanced one. Using the most dominant colour as an accent inverts the proportion that made the image work in the first place — the colour-theory guide covers the 60-30-10 split that avoids it.
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