Extract Color Palettes from Any Image — Free Tool for Artists

Color is the first thing people notice and the last thing they forget. Whether you are designing a book cover, illustrating a children's coloring page, or building a brand identity, the colors you choose determine how your work feels before anyone reads a single word. A cohesive color palette transforms amateur work into something that looks intentional, polished, and professional. The problem is that choosing those colors from scratch is one of the hardest parts of any creative project.

The Color Palette Generator at Univers Studio solves this by letting you extract a harmonious palette directly from any image you upload. Drop in a photo, an illustration, a screenshot, or a texture, and the tool instantly analyzes the dominant colors and returns a balanced palette of five to eight colors you can use immediately. Copy values in HEX, RGB, or HSL. Export the palette as a PNG strip. No account required, no software to install, and completely free.

Why Color Palettes Matter

Color harmony is not a matter of personal taste alone. It follows principles rooted in how human vision processes light and contrast. When colors work together, they create a sense of balance and coherence that viewers perceive instinctively, even if they cannot articulate why something looks right. When colors clash or feel random, the result looks disjointed regardless of how strong the underlying drawing, layout, or photography might be.

This matters at every scale of creative work. A children's coloring book with a consistent warm palette across all its pages feels like a unified product rather than a collection of unrelated drawings. A brand that uses the same five colors across its website, packaging, and social media builds instant recognition. An illustrator who maintains color consistency across a series of prints creates a body of work that feels cohesive when displayed together.

The challenge is that most people do not think in color codes. You might know that you want the feeling of a sunset over the ocean, but translating that feeling into specific HEX values that work together in print and on screen is a different skill entirely. This is exactly where palette extraction becomes invaluable. Instead of guessing, you start with an image that already embodies the mood you want, and you extract the exact colors that make it work.

Professional designers have used this technique for decades, sampling colors from reference images in Photoshop or Illustrator. The difference now is that you do not need expensive software or years of training. You upload an image, and the algorithm does the analysis for you in seconds.

Extract Palettes from Any Image

The core feature of the Color Palette Generator is image-based extraction. The process is straightforward: you upload any image file, the tool analyzes the pixel data to identify the most dominant and visually significant colors, and it returns a curated palette of five to eight harmonious swatches.

What makes this more useful than simply eyedropping random pixels from an image is the intelligence behind the selection. The algorithm does not just pick the most frequently occurring colors. It weighs visual prominence, contrast relationships, and color distribution to produce a palette that is balanced and usable. A photo of a forest will not return eight shades of green. It will return the key greens alongside the complementary earth tones, sky blues, and accent colors that give the image its character.

This works with virtually any type of image:

• Photographs: Landscape photos, food photography, portraits, and travel shots all contain rich, natural palettes that translate beautifully to design work
• Illustrations and artwork: Extract the palette from a painting you admire, a vintage poster, or a digital illustration to understand what makes its colors work
• Screenshots and UI designs: Capture the color scheme from a website, app, or interface you want to reference
• Textures and patterns: Fabric swatches, wallpaper samples, and material textures contain subtle color relationships that are hard to identify by eye alone
• Book covers and packaging: Reverse-engineer the color strategy behind successful products in your market

Generate Color Schemes

Beyond extracting palettes from images, the tool also lets you generate color schemes from a single starting color. This is useful when you already have one brand color, one accent shade, or one specific hue in mind but need to build a complete palette around it.

The generator supports several classic color harmony models:

• Complementary: Pairs your starting color with the color directly opposite it on the color wheel. This creates maximum contrast and visual energy. A deep blue paired with a warm orange, for example, is a complementary combination that feels dynamic and bold.
• Analogous: Selects colors adjacent to your starting color on the wheel. This produces a harmonious, low-contrast palette that feels calm and unified. Think of the range from yellow-green through green to blue-green: all related, all peaceful together.
• Triadic: Uses three colors evenly spaced around the wheel at 120-degree intervals. This creates a balanced, vibrant scheme with more variety than complementary but more structure than random selection.
• Split-complementary: A variation of complementary that uses the two colors adjacent to the complement rather than the complement itself. This gives you the contrast of a complementary scheme with more nuance and less visual tension.

Each of these schemes is grounded in color theory that dates back centuries, from the work of Isaac Newton and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to modern digital design systems. The generator makes these principles accessible without requiring you to study them. Pick a starting color, choose a harmony type, and receive a complete, balanced palette.

Copy in Any Format

A color palette is only useful if you can actually apply it in your tools. The generator outputs every color in three standard formats that cover virtually every use case in digital and print design.

HEX codes are the most common format for web design and digital tools. A HEX code like #7C3AED describes a color as a six-character combination of red, green, and blue values in hexadecimal notation. Click any swatch in your generated palette, and the HEX code is copied to your clipboard instantly. Paste it into CSS, Figma, Canva, Illustrator, or any tool that accepts HEX input.

RGB values describe colors as a combination of red, green, and blue channels on a scale from 0 to 255. This format is used natively by most image editing software, including Photoshop, GIMP, and Procreate. If your workflow involves pixel-based editing, RGB values are often the most natural format to work with.

HSL values describe colors in terms of hue, saturation, and lightness. This format is particularly useful for CSS and for making systematic adjustments. If you want a lighter or darker version of a color, adjusting the L value in HSL is far more intuitive than modifying individual RGB channels. Designers who work with CSS custom properties and design tokens often prefer HSL for its readability.

The one-click copy feature means you never have to manually type color codes. See a swatch you want, click it, and it is on your clipboard ready to paste. This small workflow improvement adds up significantly when you are applying a palette across multiple pages, components, or files.

Export as PNG

Sometimes you need your palette as a visual artifact rather than a list of codes. The export feature lets you download your entire palette as a clean PNG strip showing each color as a labeled swatch, side by side.

This PNG export serves several practical purposes. You can share it with clients or collaborators who need to see and approve the palette before you begin designing. You can add it to a mood board alongside reference images, typography samples, and layout sketches. You can include it in brand guidelines as the official color reference. You can attach it to a brief or project handoff document so that everyone involved in production uses the same colors.

For book creators specifically, having a PNG palette strip is useful during the illustration and layout process. Pin it to the side of your screen or print it out as a physical reference card. When you are coloring the fortieth page of a coloring book, having the exact palette visible at all times prevents color drift where each page subtly shifts away from the original intent.

The exported PNG is high-resolution and ready for both screen and print use. It includes color labels so the swatches are self-documenting, not just anonymous colored rectangles.

For Illustrators and Book Creators

If you create coloring books, illustrated children's books, or print-on-demand products, color consistency is one of the most important and most overlooked aspects of production quality. Readers and buyers may not consciously analyze your color choices, but they absolutely notice when something feels off. A coloring book where each page uses a slightly different set of colors feels disjointed. A series of book covers with inconsistent palettes does not read as a series.

The palette generator gives you a systematic way to maintain consistency. At the start of a project, choose or create a reference image that captures the mood you want for the entire book or series. Extract the palette from that image. Then use those exact colors, and only those colors, across every page, every cover, and every marketing asset.

This approach is especially powerful when combined with the Color by Number Generator. When you create color by number pages, the algorithm assigns colors from the image's palette. By starting with a controlled palette, you ensure that all your color by number pages share a cohesive visual language, even when the subject matter varies from page to page. A nature-themed color by number book might use a consistent palette of forest greens, earth browns, sky blues, and warm golds across every page, whether the subject is a deer, a mushroom, or a mountain landscape.

For illustrators working on a series, the PNG export feature is particularly valuable. Export your palette once and keep it as a permanent reference file alongside your project assets. Share it with co-illustrators, colorists, or print production teams to ensure everyone works from the same source of truth.

For Branding and Marketing

Every brand has colors, whether they were chosen deliberately or emerged by accident. The most recognizable brands in the world are inseparable from their color palettes. You can identify them from a color swatch alone, without seeing a logo or reading a name. That level of color consistency does not happen by accident. It requires knowing your exact colors and using them everywhere, without exception.

The palette generator helps you establish or refine your brand colors in two ways. If you are starting from scratch, upload your logo, your hero image, or a reference photo that captures the feeling you want your brand to convey. The extracted palette becomes your starting point for a brand color system. If you already have brand colors but they exist only informally, perhaps as the colors that happened to be in your first logo draft, the tool lets you formalize them by generating precise HEX, RGB, and HSL values you can document and share.

For self-published authors, this is directly relevant to book marketing. Your book covers, Amazon listing images, social media graphics, website, and email headers should all use the same palette. When a potential reader sees your Instagram post, then encounters your book on Amazon, and later visits your website, the consistent colors create a thread of recognition that builds trust and professionalism. The palette generator makes this achievable even if you do not have a dedicated graphic designer on your team.

For Teachers and Students

Color theory is one of the foundational topics in art education, but it can feel abstract when taught purely from diagrams and definitions. The palette generator turns color theory into a hands-on exploration by letting students analyze real images and discover color relationships for themselves.

A teacher can project a famous painting, say Monet's Water Lilies or Van Gogh's Starry Night, and have students predict what colors they think dominate the composition. Then upload the image to the generator and compare the extracted palette against the students' predictions. This exercise sharpens observational skills and demonstrates how artists use color in ways that are often more complex and subtle than they first appear. Students discover that a painting they thought was "mostly blue" actually contains significant amounts of green, violet, and ochre working together to create that overall impression.

For student projects, the palette generator is a practical tool for creating mood boards. Instead of vaguely describing their intended color scheme in words, students can find reference images that match their vision, extract palettes from them, and present specific color swatches alongside their project proposals. This teaches them to think about color deliberately rather than choosing it on impulse.

The tool is also useful for teaching the relationship between color and emotion. Students can extract palettes from images associated with different moods: a stormy seascape, a sunny meadow, a bustling city at night, a quiet library interior. Comparing the resulting palettes side by side makes the emotional language of color visible and concrete. Warm palettes, cool palettes, high-saturation versus low-saturation, high-contrast versus monochromatic: all of these concepts become tangible when students can see and compare real examples.

Final Thoughts

Color is one of the most powerful tools in any creative discipline, and having the right palette can elevate your work from good to exceptional. The difficulty has never been a lack of beautiful colors in the world. It has been the gap between seeing a color combination you love and being able to capture, name, and reuse it precisely. The Color Palette Generator bridges that gap.

For illustrators and book creators, it brings consistency across pages and series. For brands and marketers, it ensures every touchpoint reinforces the same visual identity. For teachers and students, it turns abstract color theory into hands-on discovery. And for anyone who has ever seen a photograph, a painting, or a sunset and wished they could bottle those exact colors for their own work, it does exactly that.

The process takes seconds. Upload an image, review the extracted palette, copy the values you need, and export a PNG if you want a visual reference. No account, no installation, no cost. Just your image and the colors hidden inside it, ready to use in whatever you create next.