Every picture has a palette.
Drop in an image to see it simplified into a few colors you can mix, with a paint recipe for each one.
Everything runs in your browser. Your images never leave this device.
How different two colors can be and still count as one. Slide right to simplify the picture into fewer colors; at Exact it's the original.
Only shortens the list: the picture keeps every color.
Only shortens the list: the picture still paints every color, up to 50,000 mixes.
When no mix matches exactly, what it gets right first. Toward hue, a dark red-brown gets a touch of red even if the mix comes out a little light; toward value, it stays as dark as the image, even if that means plain black. Both tabs use it.
Tubes to put out
Your tubes
How many tubes?
The best tubes for each count, and how much of the picture they mix nearly as closely as all your tubes (within ΔE 3, a barely visible difference): overall, in hue and in value. The suggestion is the fewest that manage 98%. Hover a count to preview the picture painted with it; click it to mix every recipe from just those tubes.
Palette strings
Premix these before you start, biggest first. Read each tree left to right: mix the tubes on the left, then make each next pile from the one before it. Take some of that pile and add the paint on the arrow, in the parts under it (3:1 is 3 parts of the pile before to 1 part paint), so mix enough of a pile for the ones after it. Hover or tap an arrow to have its step spelled out. A string adds more white (or a black, umber or blue) pile by pile; a branch adds a little of another tube to a pile to start a new string or one more color. The number on each swatch is the pile's value, from 0 (black) to 10 (white), and under it how much of the most detailed step it covers. A dashed pile isn't in the picture: a base, or an in-between pile that evens out a wide jump.
Step by step
The image as if painted with just 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 or 34 colors, simple to complex. Each starts from the highest simplicity that still splits the image into that many areas of real size. Then every color moves to the area whose average is nearest, over and over until they settle (k-means), and each area is filled with its average color. A color carried over from the step before keeps the color already mixed, so each step only adds new piles to the palette. Hover an image to see the mix under the pointer; click it, or a color in a bar, to copy it.
Under each image: how to mix the colors it adds to the one before, from Max Ginsburg's palette. Mixes are predicted like real paint (Kubelka-Munk, via spectral.js), so yellow and blue make green. Each split swatch is the image's color on the left and the mix on the right.
Value study
The picture in values only, from 0 (black) to 10 (white) on the Munsell scale. Plan the big lights and darks here before any color: at 2 values it's a notan, the pattern of light against shadow. Each study splits the picture where its values group most tightly and paints each part with its average value. Hover a study to read the value of any spot. Every mix on the other tabs shows its value on the same scale.
Bookmarklet
Find the palette of any picture on the web in one click.
Desktop: drag the button onto your bookmarks bar.
No bookmarks bar? Press ⌘ShiftB to show it.
Drag it, don't click it: hold the button and drop it on your bookmarks bar ↑
Phone / tablet (or if dragging doesn't work)
- Bookmark this page.
- Edit the bookmark: rename it Palette and replace its address with the copied code.
Using it
- Open the picture in its own tab (right-click → Open image in new tab) and click 🎨 Palette. On any other page it uses the largest image on screen.
- The image comes here after the
#in the address, which browsers never send to a server. All the color math runs in your browser. - Some sites block scripts from reading their images. Then the bookmarklet sends just the image's address, and if that site won't share the image either, opening the picture in its own tab first fixes it.
- Large images are scaled down to at most 1200 px on the long side so they fit in an address. Percentages come from the scaled image.
Source: bookmarklet.js. Links can also preset the sliders and paints: #s=3&top=12&sort=wheel&pal=zorn&src=<image URL>.