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Build A Color Palette From Your Photos - Online

There are a number of ways we can acquire inspiration for building color palettes for the web. Some tools offer pre-made color swatches or the option to make selections on-the-fly. Since we now have the ability to snap good quality photos with our phones, we can capture color anytime from our pocket and then pull what we need, when we need it.

Photos can give us both unlimited and limited color palettes. Like the muted tones of a sunset, or colors seen in your favorite vacation picture?  The below tools, extract, average, and build palettes based on whatever photo you upload. You can save color combos for later use, or share them with a community of the like-minded. And best of all, all below online tools are free.


Color Explorer
This site hosts a number of color tools including the option to upload a photo (no larger than 250k) and extract anything from 3 to 50 colors from a given file. Individual color swatches give RGB and hex values, and can be combined with other swatches to form complementary palettes that may be stored in a library.


Color Pallete Generator
Strictly for hex colors only, Colors Palette Generator gives you the option to click on colors that it extracts to build a palette rather then building one for you. File uploads can go as high as 1 MB file and after you finish making selections, you may then save the selections as a .css file or .aco file which can be loaded into your Photoshop Swatches panel.


Pictaculous
Not as sophisticated at the other tools mentioned here, what Pictaculous does have, is an engine to suggest alternative colors alongside the ones extracted from your photo (file size limits to 500k). Using a social media approach towards building hues, via Adobe’s Kuler and colourlovers websites, you may email, use Digg or share your findings.

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