TOOLS › PALETTE EXTRACTOR
FREE · NO SIGN-UP · RUNS IN YOUR BROWSER

Extract Colours from an Image

Drop in a sprite, a screenshot or a photo and get its palette back as hex codes. Every exact colour, or the dominant few. Export to .hex, .gpl, .pal or a PNG strip.

1 · YOUR IMAGE

DROP, PASTE OR BROWSE
PNG, JPG, WebP or GIF · up to 4 megapixels

2 · SETTINGS

Mode
Exact lists every unique colour, most used first. Dominant reduces the image to a handful that represent it.
Need new sprites that use these exact colours? SpriteLab's palette lock takes a hex list and snaps every generation to it.
Palette appears below
NOTHING HERE YETDrop an image on the left. The palette is read straight away and listed under the preview.

How it works

Drop in an image

A sprite you want to match, a screenshot from a game you like, a photo with a mood you want to borrow. Up to 4 megapixels, nothing is uploaded.

Choose Exact or Dominant

Exact reads every unique colour, which is right for real pixel art. Dominant finds the N colours that best stand in for a photo or a noisy image, using the same reduction as our colour reducer.

Copy or export

Click a swatch to copy one hex, click the text box to select the lot, or download the palette as .hex, .gpl, .pal or a PNG strip for your editor.

Exact vs dominant

Real pixel art has a short, intentional palette: a 32px character might use 9 colours, a whole tileset maybe 24. Exact mode shows that list as-is, sorted by how many pixels use each colour, so the main body tones sit at the top and the single-pixel highlights at the bottom.

Photos and AI output are the opposite. A 512px render can contain forty thousand unique shades, none of them meaningful on their own. Dominant mode collapses that to the handful that describe the image, which is what you want when you are borrowing a mood rather than copying a sprite. If a piece of "pixel art" shows hundreds of colours in Exact mode, it has been resampled or JPG-compressed somewhere along the way; the fix pixel art tool can usually recover the original grid and palette. Once you have the list, the palette lock in SpriteLab will draw every new sprite in it.

FAQ

Is the palette extractor free?

Yes. It runs in your browser, so there is no account and no upload. The image never leaves your machine.

What is the difference between Exact and Dominant?

Exact lists every unique opaque colour in the image, most common first. That is what you want for real pixel art, where the palette is small and deliberate. Dominant boils a photo or a noisy image down to the N colours that best represent it.

Which export format should I use?

.hex is one colour per line and imports into Aseprite, Lospec and most modern editors. .gpl is the GIMP format, also read by Krita, Inkscape and Pixelorama. .pal is the older JASC format used by Paint Shop Pro and a lot of retro tooling. The PNG strip works anywhere that can eyedrop from an image.

Why does my pixel art show more colours than I expected?

Usually it was saved as JPG or resized with smoothing at some point, which adds hundreds of blended in-between shades. Run it through the fix pixel art tool first, or switch to Dominant to see the real palette underneath the noise.

Can I make new sprites in this palette?

Yes. Copy the hex list into the palette lock in the SpriteLab app and every sprite you generate is snapped to those exact colours, so new assets match the ones you already have.

More free tools

In the app

Open SpriteLab to keep building with your sprites.