How to Pick a Color Palette From a Photo

A photo is one of the easiest places to find colors that already work together. A sunset, a forest or a plate of food has a built-in palette, and you can pull it out in seconds.

How a palette is found

A photo has thousands of slightly different colors. To find the main ones, the tool groups colors that are close to each other and averages each group. The percentage on each swatch shows how much of the picture it covers, so the biggest areas come first. The Color Palette tool lets you choose between 2 and 12 colors.

Choosing the picture

• Pick a photo with a mood you want, such as calm, bold or warm.
• Simple photos give cleaner palettes than busy ones.
• Crop first if a bright object you don't care about takes up a lot of the picture.

Using the colors

Click a swatch to copy its hex code, like #3a7bd5, or copy the whole set as a list, as CSS variables or as JSON. For a website, a good rule is one main color, one or two supporting ones and a neutral. Use the biggest, quietest color for backgrounds and save the brightest for buttons and highlights.

Check the contrast

Colors from a photo can look lovely and still be hard to read as text. Light text on a light color, or dark on dark, is a common problem. The Color Converter includes a contrast checker, so you can see whether a pair meets accessibility guidelines before you use it.

A few ideas

• Match your slides or brand colors to a photo of your product.
• Pick paint or decor shades from a photo of a room you like.
• Build a theme for a game, a poster or a social media template.
• Photos of nature are a good place to start, since the colors rarely clash.