Material You Scheme Builder
Android does not just show your wallpaper — it pulls a colour out of it and repaints the whole interface. Drop an image in to see the tonal palette it would generate, and what the result looks like in light and dark mode, before you commit to it.
🔒 Your image is read directly in your browser. It is never uploaded or stored anywhere.
These are the image's most prominent colours. The highlighted one is the seed — the colour the theme is built from. Click another to see what a different choice would do.
The tonal palette: one hue held constant, lightness stepped from 0 to 100. Every colour in the interface below is taken from this strip. Click a swatch to copy it.
What Android is actually doing
When you set a wallpaper on a modern Android phone, the system runs a quantiser over the image, scores the colours it finds for how much of the picture they cover and how vivid they are, and picks a single winner. That one colour — the seed — is then expanded into a tonal palette: the same hue at a fixed series of lightness steps, conventionally 0, 10, 20 and so on up to 100. Every part of the interface is assigned a step rather than a colour. A filled button takes tone 40 in light mode and tone 80 in dark mode; the text on it takes tone 100 and tone 20 respectively.
Working in steps rather than in fixed colours is what keeps the system readable whatever wallpaper you choose. Because a button and its label are always drawn from tones far apart on the strip, the contrast between them survives even when the hue changes completely.
Why the preview is close but not exact
This tool generates the tonal palette in HSL, which is a simple and predictable colour space. Android uses HCT, a space built on CAM16 that models perceived brightness rather than arithmetic lightness. The practical difference shows up most in yellows and cyans, which HSL treats as darker than the eye does, so the middle of the strip above can sit a shade off where your phone would put it. Hue and overall character match closely; individual steps may not.
The seed choice can also differ. Android weighs colours by area and vividness together, and applies its own rules to rule out near-greys, so a picture with two strong candidates can go either way. That is why the swatches are clickable here — if your phone picked something you did not expect, one of the alternatives above is probably what it landed on.
Choosing a wallpaper for the theme it makes
- One strong colour beats several. An image with a single dominant hue gives a confident, stable theme. One with three competing colours produces a seed that flips when you crop the picture slightly differently.
- Illustration is more predictable than photography. Painted and drawn images use flatter, deliberate colour, so the quantiser finds an obvious winner. Photographs spread their colour across thousands of near-identical shades.
- Near-grey images give near-grey interfaces. A beautiful desaturated photograph will theme your phone in beige. If you want the system to have some colour, the wallpaper has to contain some.
- Very saturated wallpapers are loud everywhere. The accent does not stay in one place — it lands on quick-settings tiles, switches, progress bars and app backgrounds all at once.
If you want the raw numbers rather than the theme, the palette extractor gives you the dominant colours as hex and HSL. For the reasoning behind which palettes work behind an icon grid at all, see the practical guide to colour theory for phone wallpapers, and for the wider customization picture, Android customization in 2026.
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