Color Palette Extractor

Why Extract Palettes for AI Video?

AI video and image work benefits from consistent brand color. Extract a palette from a reference image (mood board, brand asset, hero shot) and feed those colors into your brand kit. Imagen and Veo can be prompted with specific color language for more consistent output.

Privacy

The extractor runs entirely in your browser. Your image is never uploaded to a server.

How AI models interpret color in a prompt

Imagen, Veo, and Gemini all respect explicit hex codes more reliably than they respect named colors. A prompt that says "navy wool coat" gets you a navy coat that drifts between #1a2540 and #2c3e62 across generations. A prompt that says "wool coat in #1c2541" pins the color to within a few percent across every generation. For brand work where the color must match the spec sheet, always feed the hex codes directly.

When you have a five-to-eight color palette extracted from a brand reference, the recommended prompt syntax is: "primary color #7c3aed across the wardrobe and the dominant prop, secondary color #ec4899 for accent details, neutrals from #f8fafc to #1e293b for the environment." The model treats this as a binding instruction rather than a vague description.

Reading a hex code

A hex code is three pairs of hexadecimal digits — red, green, then blue — each running 00 to FF, which is 0 to 255 in decimal. In #1C2541 that is R=28, G=37, B=65: very little red, a little more green, noticeably more blue. A dark navy.

Two shortcuts make hex readable at a glance. If all three pairs are equal the colour is a pure grey, and the higher the pairs run the lighter it gets. If one pair clearly leads, that channel is the hue.

The extractor above outputs hex because it is the format every design tool, CSS file and prompt accepts. Click any swatch to copy it.

Building a palette around a colour you already have

Brand work usually starts from a fixed hex rather than an image. The extractor cannot take a code as input, but the relationships you want are simple enough to reason about directly.

• Analogous — neighbours on the colour wheel. Quiet, cohesive, low contrast. Safe for backgrounds.
• Complementary — the opposite side of the wheel. Maximum contrast, which is why it works for a single call-to-action and fails as a whole scheme.
• Triadic — three points evenly spaced. Vivid and balanced, but it needs one dominant colour or it reads as clutter.
• Monochromatic — one hue at several lightnesses. The most reliable way to look deliberate.

A practical shortcut: shoot or generate an image that already contains your brand colour, run it through the extractor, and take the palette the photograph gives you. Real light produces relationships that are harder to invent from a wheel.

Hex in an AI prompt

Image and video models do not read hex codes reliably. Writing #1C2541 in a prompt usually produces something in the right family and often does not.

Name the colour instead. "Deep navy blue, almost black" gets closer to #1C2541 than the code does, because the model was trained on language describing colour rather than on the notation.

Use hex where it is authoritative — brand kits, CSS, overlays and text added in post — and words where the model is doing the rendering.

Three uses for an extracted palette

• Brand kit lockdown. Drop a brand-book hero image and extract the authoritative five-color set. Save those hex codes in Playcut's brand kit so every future generation auto-prompts with them — no per-generation re-entry.
• Moodboard translation. Drop the moodboard images a client sent over and extract the colors that visually define the reference. Paste them into your Veo or Imagen prompt as the style register. This is the fastest way to bridge "make it look like this Pinterest board" to "here is a prompt the model can execute."
• Competitor analysis. Drop a competitor's hero ad creative and extract its palette. You'll find that most performance creative in a vertical converges on the same 3-5 colors. Knowing the convergence lets you either match it (for category credibility) or deliberately break it (for category disruption).
• Brand asset production. Once the palette is locked, carry it into the rest of your brand surface: the free favicon generator builds the browser icon set from a brand-colored source image, and the free image watermark tool stamps a logo or wordmark in your palette onto every export before it ships.

Color Palette Extractor FAQ

How many colors does the extractor pull?

The tool returns the five dominant colors by default and lets you expand to eight if your reference image has more visual variety. Five is typically the right number for a brand kit; eight is the right number for a complex moodboard with multiple distinct objects or settings.

Why does the extractor use k-means clustering?

K-means clustering groups pixels by visual similarity in the LAB color space, which matches how human eyes perceive color difference more accurately than RGB clustering. The result is a palette that captures the actual visual register of the image rather than a noisy sample of arbitrary pixels.

Can I tune the extraction for skin tones?

The default extraction treats every color equally. If you're working with portrait references and want the palette to focus on wardrobe and environment rather than skin, we recommend cropping the reference image to exclude faces before dropping it into the tool. A skin-tone-aware extraction mode is on the roadmap.

Do you support importing a Playcut brand kit directly?

Yes, from inside the Playcut studio. The brand-kit color extractor is available on every plan; the standalone tool on this page is the no-signup version of the same functionality.

Want the full studio?

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