Colour from an image
Read the colours back out of a picture you already have.
- Pick a colour out of an imagePoint at a pixel and read its colour back. The value comes from the decoded image at full resolution, not from the copy scaled to fit your screen.
- Extract a palette from an imageDrop in a picture and get a set of colours back, each one carrying the share of the frame it stands for.
About these tools
Sometimes the colour you need only exists inside a picture. A screenshot of a chart nobody documented, a photograph of packaging, a logo handed over as a PNG with no style guide anywhere behind it. The value is sitting in the pixels, and the usual way to get it is a screen magnifier and a guess.
One caution before you trust a single pixel. A JPEG stores colour at half resolution in each direction and reconstructs the rest, so an individual pixel near any edge holds a value the camera never saw. Averaging a small spot lands much closer to what your eye reads as the colour there, and it is why these tools sample an area rather than a point. Sampling also happens on the full decode rather than on the picture scaled to fit your screen, since resampling for display invents colours of its own.
The other thing worth knowing is that a dominant colour is a decision rather than a measurement. How many colours you asked for, which space the grouping happened in, and whether the pale background counts as one of them all change the answer, and none of those has a correct setting. So they are controls on the page instead of defaults buried in the code, and each page says what its own grouping does.