Image Color Picker

Upload a photo, a screenshot, or a piece of artwork, and this reads the actual pixel values to report the top five dominant colours and the overall average colour — the exact hex codes present in the image, rather than a guess made by eye. Matching a brand colour, building a palette from a mood board photo, or checking what colour something really is on screen all come down to the same need: reading pixels precisely instead of eyeballing them.

• Dominant colours are the handful of distinct colours that occupy the most pixels in the image — useful for building an actual palette to design with, since they reflect real, usable colour choices present in the source.
• Average colour is every pixel blended into one single value — useful as a quick summary of an image's overall tone (is this photo generally warm or cool, light or dark), but it is a mathematical average, not necessarily a colour that appears anywhere in the actual image.

A sunset photo with vivid orange sky and a dark silhouetted foreground might average out to a muddy brown that appears nowhere in the real image — that is expected, not a bug, and it is exactly why the two figures answer different questions.

• Extracting a brand palette from an existing logo or marketing image when the original colour values were never documented.
• Matching a design to a photo — pulling colours from a hero image to use for accents elsewhere on a page.
• Checking what colour something actually is on screen, rather than trusting how it looks to the eye, which is affected by surrounding colours and monitor calibration.
• Building a palette from inspiration — a photo, an artwork, a screenshot of a design you like.

Once you have a hex code from this tool, Color Code Converter converts it to RGB, HSL or CMYK as needed, and Color Shades & Tints generates a full range of lighter and darker steps from it for a complete design palette rather than one isolated value.