Image palette extraction — Troubleshooting

Worked example

All greys and white means the background dominates, fewer than eight swatches means a simple image, a missing accent means too few pixels.

When the list is full of whites and greys, the background is winning the pixel count, so crop to the subject and run again. When only three or four swatches appear, that is expected for a logo or a flat illustration: shades closer than about 58 units merge, so a gradient from light to dark blue may appear as just two or three blues.

Take a shop owner whose product photo has a small red label that never shows up. The label covers a tiny fraction of a picture that is reduced to 160 pixels, so it loses the count. Crop tightly around the label and run again to bring that red forward.

If a swatch does not match the logo exactly, that is the 24-step rounding at work, not a mistake; use the picker on the original pixel for the exact value. If the message says no opaque colours were found, the image is almost entirely transparent, so check that the file is the right export. Unreadable files, empty files, or several dropped files at once are rejected, so use a single PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, SVG, AVIF or BMP.

If a copy button does nothing, the browser may have blocked the clipboard; the value stays on screen, so select it and copy by hand. Different crops give different palettes, which is normal and useful rather than a bug.

Image with several dominant colors

Palette swatches and color codes

The same image always gives the same palette; only changes to the crop, the file or the transparency alter the result.