Ever needed to pull a color scheme out of a photo, a screenshot, or a client's logo — and hesitated for a second because you didn't want to upload it to some random website?
That hesitation is exactly why I built the Color Palette Extractor on SamToolkit, a free, privacy-first developer tools site. Every tool on SamToolkit runs entirely in your browser using Blazor WebAssembly — nothing you upload ever touches a server.
What it does
Drop in any image — a photo, a mockup, a brand logo — and the tool analyzes the pixel data locally and returns a ready-to-use palette:
- Dominant colors, ranked by prevalence
- Hex, RGB, and HSL values for every extracted color, one click to copy
- A quick preview swatch strip so you can eyeball the palette before using it
- Works with PNG, JPG, and WebP
It's built for the moment you're staring at a reference image thinking "I just need these five colors as hex codes" — no account, no upload limit, no image leaving your machine.
Why client-side matters here
Color extraction is a genuinely good fit for running entirely in-browser:
- Privacy — brand assets, unreleased designs, or client photos never leave your device.
- Speed — no round trip to a server means the palette appears almost instantly after you drop the file.
- No limits — since there's no backend processing cost, there's no arbitrary cap on how many images you can run through it.
Under the hood, the tool decodes the image into a pixel buffer, buckets similar colors together (so you get a clean palette instead of 40 near-identical shades of blue), and sorts by frequency — all inside WebAssembly, at native-ish speed.
A quick example
Say you're building a landing page and the client sent over a product photo with a color scheme you want to match. Instead of eyeballing hex codes in a screenshot tool:
- Open the Color Palette Extractor
- Drag the image in
- Copy the hex codes straight into your CSS:
:root {
--color-primary: #2f6f4f;
--color-secondary: #e8b04b;
--color-accent: #c1443c;
--color-neutral: #f4f1ea;
}
Done — no design software required.
Part of a bigger toolkit
The Color Palette Extractor is one of about 30 browser-based utilities on SamToolkit — JSON formatters, image converters, text diff tools, and more, all following the same rule: nothing leaves your browser.
If you try it out, I'd love to hear what you think — and if there's a color or design tool you wish existed, drop it in the comments.
