Pick Colours and Extract a Palette from an Image

Pixel sampling is exact: the value you copy is the value stored at that coordinate, not an average of the click area. That matters when you are picking a brand colour off a logo, where anti-aliased edge pixels shade toward the background — zoom your source before exporting it, or click well inside flat regions to avoid sampling a blend.

The palette comes from median cut, the classic quantisation algorithm: the image's pixels are treated as points in RGB space, the box containing them is split repeatedly along its widest axis at the median, and each final box contributes its average colour. Three rounds of splitting yield eight swatches that between them cover the image's actual distribution — dominant tones weighted by area, not by visual salience.

That distinction explains the most common surprise: a small but striking red jacket may not earn a swatch, because area-weighted analysis sees mostly the grey street around it. For accent colours, use the click picker on the detail itself; use the palette for the overall temperature and grading of the image.

HSL output is included because it is the notation you can reason in — H shifts hue, S mutes or intensifies, L lightens. Taking a palette colour and producing hover and border variants is a matter of nudging L a few points, which is far more predictable than editing HEX digits.