Start from one colour and get a palette a pixel artist would actually use: a shading ramp with hue-shifted shadows and highlights, a colour harmony expanded into ramps, or a plain mono ramp. See it on a shaded sphere, copy the hex codes, export for your editor.
Type a hex, use the picker, or hit RANDOM until something sings. The base is the mid-tone of the ramp, the colour the sprite is mostly made of.
Ramp is one material shaded properly. Harmony gives you two to four related hues, each with its own short ramp, for a whole character or scene. Mono is a straight lightness ramp with no hue movement.
The sphere shows the ramp on a real form. When the bands look right, click swatches to copy hex codes, or download the palette as .hex, .gpl or .pal for your editor.
A palette built by only darkening and lightening one colour looks like a gradient tool made it. Pixel artists shift the hue as they go, and the ramp mode does the same three things they do by hand.
Each darker step rotates a few degrees toward blue and purple and drops a touch of saturation. A red in shadow becomes a wine, not a brown.
Each lighter step rotates toward yellow and picks up a little saturation, so a blue highlight reads as light hitting it, not as a washed-out blue.
Low spread gives a soft, close ramp for skin and cloth. High spread gives punchy metal and gems. The sphere tells you when you have gone too far.
Harmony mode takes the base hue, finds its complement, triad, split or tetrad, and builds a three-step ramp for each with the same rule. That is a usable starter palette for a whole sprite: one hue for the body, one for the trim, one for the accent.
Yes. It runs in your browser with no account and nothing is uploaded. Generate as many palettes as you like and export them in any of the three formats.
Real shadows are not just darker, they lean cooler, and highlights lean warmer. A ramp that only changes lightness looks flat and muddy. The ramp mode moves each darker step a little toward blue and purple and each lighter step toward yellow, which is the rule pixel artists use by hand. The slider sets how many degrees per step.
Five is the usual answer for a character: shadow, mid-shadow, base, mid-light, highlight. Three is enough for tiny 16 px sprites, and seven to nine suits large sprites, backgrounds and anything with soft forms.
The current ramp painted onto a 24 px ball lit from the top left, in bands. It is the quickest way to see whether the steps are evenly spaced and whether the shadows read as the same material as the highlights. If it looks striped or the dark side turns grey, lower the spread or the hue shift.
.hex is a plain list of hex codes that Aseprite, Lospec and most web tools read. .gpl is the GIMP palette format, also used by Aseprite, Krita and Inkscape. .pal is the JASC format that Paint Shop Pro, GraphicsGale and some game tools want.
Pull the exact palette out of any sprite as .hex, .gpl or .pal.
Map one or many sprites onto this palette, by nearest colour or by lightness.
Snap any image to 2 to 64 colours, with optional dithering.
Open SpriteLab to keep building with your sprites.