Image Colour Extraction

This plugin extracts a colour palette from any image in your file. You select an image, choose a method and the number of colours, and the plugin returns a hue-sorted frame of colour tones.

Colour managementThe plugin works in OKLab so candidates are compared and grouped by perceived difference rather than RGB distance. The Average method takes its mean in OKLab too, which avoids the muddy-brown result you get from naive linear-sRGB averaging when an image has complementary colours.

MethodsDominant: use this for palettes that should feel like the source.

Average: use this for an overall tone.

High contrast: use this when you want a palette that's maximally distinguishable, like for charts.

ControlsSaturation: filter and weight colours by chroma.

Lightness: filter and weight colours by perceptual lightness.

Diversity: sets the minimum perceptual distance between picked tones. Only meaningfully applies to Dominant.

Ignore (optional): skips pixels that match a category.

Colours: how many tones to create, from 1 to 8.SpecificationsWhen a preference can't be respected (for example, asking for muted on an image with no muted regions), the plugin tells you that it fell back to the closest candidates rather than failing silently.

Illustration inspired by Dan Hollick's work.