Color palette from any image.

When you load an image, Swatchboard downscales it to a small working size, then buckets every pixel by its red, green and blue values rounded to four bits per channel. The buckets are ranked by how many pixels they contain, and near-identical buckets are merged by perceptual distance — so the result is the small set of colors your eye would actually name, in order of how much of the picture they cover.

From that ranked list the extractor derives the roles a design needs: the most frequent color as the dominant, the most chromatic as the accent, and the lightest and darkest extremes by lightness. It also suggests a quiet background and a readable text color, measured against each other so the pair starts life passing contrast, not failing it.

Drop a file onto the upload zone, click to browse, or paste straight from the clipboard with ⌘V / Ctrl+V — screenshots work perfectly. Every swatch in the result is clickable to copy its hex value, and the palette exports as CSS variables, JSON, SCSS, a Tailwind config or a downloadable PNG strip.

From there, send the dominant color to the palette generator to build full harmony sets around it, or save the extracted palette to your library with tags. The whole pipeline runs on a canvas in your browser: the image is never uploaded, never stored, and works offline once the page has loaded. Photos with clearly separated colors extract the cleanest palettes; flat brand shots and UI screenshots are ideal.