Build a colour palette in the browser from a hex or a photo on disk

Extracting hex from a product photo does not require sending the photo to a palette website. Those sites are handy. They also see the shot — an unreleased product, a room in a flat you have not listed, a brand draft.

Colour palette on Tool Hub runs in your browser. You pick a base colour or an image on your computer. Copy hex. We do not store the picture.

When this palette tool is the right tool

Use this page to start a scheme from a hex you already have, or to pull colours from a photo you own. Typical jobs: a slide; a simple landing page; matching a physical swatch you photographed.

This is not a brand-guide generator with accessibility law baked in. A photo of a room is not WCAG. Check contrast yourself if the palette is for text on a webpage. This is not a printer ICC workflow. This is not Cutout or ID Photo — those family mounts are not live on this host.

I sample a photo I took. I do not scrape a competitor’s site through an upload “extract palette from URL” box that fetches the page on their server.

What “in the browser” means

The tab reads the image pixels or expands a base hue. Hex strings are copied locally. Offline-after-load works for a file you already picked after the page loaded.

How I build a palette here

1. Open https://tools.sw-commercial.com/color-palette.
2. Enter a base hex, or pick an image from disk.
3. Copy the hex codes you will actually use. Write them down in the design file you already have.
4. If the palette is for body text, test contrast in a checker you trust — or by eye on a big heading, then verify. Do not ship pale grey on white because the photo was sunny.
5. Keep the photo on disk. The palette is a list of numbers, not a licence to the image.

No account.

Failure cases I hit while using it

A photo with mixed lighting. The “extracted” colours are the average of a mess. Sample a flat area.

A logo with a thin outline. Extraction may miss the brand blue. Pick the hex from a known brand PDF if you have one.

Screenshots of a website already posterized. You will sample the screenshot’s compression, not the brand.

When not to use this page

Do not treat the output as a legal brand system. Brands have PDFs.

Do not upload the product shot to a cloud palette to “compare.” Compare hex locally.

Do not use this as steganography or a hidden-message tool. HiddenInk is a different family product and is not live at /stego on this host.

Related jobs on the same hub

Resize image if you only needed a smaller still. PNG to JPG is unrelated except that both are local. JSON viewer if you are dumping tokens, not colours.

Live at tools.sw-commercial.com/color-palette.

A worked example

I photograph a painted wall I own. I extract a palette locally, copy three hex codes into a notes file, then check that body text would fail contrast on the palest one. I keep the photo. The palette is a start for a slide background, not a brand manual.

I do not upload the wall photo to a palette SaaS to get more colours. More colours are not worth the upload. Mixed lighting in the photo averages into a mess; I sample a flat area. A logo with a thin outline may miss the brand blue — pick that hex from a known PDF if I have one.

FAQ

Does extracting colours upload the photo? No. The tab reads pixels locally. Can I use this as a brand system? No. Brands have PDFs and contrast rules this page does not certify. What if the photo is a screenshot of a website? You will sample compression, not the brand. Photograph a flat painted surface or type a known hex instead.

How I test that the bytes stayed local

I load the Tool Hub page, wait until it is usable, then disconnect the network (airplane mode, or unplug after the JavaScript is cached). I repeat the job with a throwaway file or a throwaway paste. If the result still appears, that step did not need SW Commercial’s servers. The first visit still has to download the page itself. That is HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and sometimes a codec. It is not the document I care about.

Browser developer tools also show it. A converter that posts a multipart file to /api/upload is an upload converter. These Tool Hub jobs are not built that way. Ads, if shown, are labeled and do not receive the file. The SW Toolbox extension has 0 ads if you prefer that surface for the same engines.

I would rather keep one extra paragraph in a how-to than send a reviewer to a tool that 404s. The palette URL returned HTTP 200 when this guide was written.