Average & Dominant Colour
Returns one representative colour for an image — mean, median or most frequent — as a colour asset.
“What colour is this picture” has four defensible answers and they disagree, sometimes by a lot. This computes all four and says what each is good for, rather than picking one and calling it the average.
Drop an image
Four different answers to “what colour is this picture”, and why they disagree.
How to use it
Drop an image
It is decoded, sampled and measured; no output file is produced, because nobody downloads the picture they just dropped in.
Take the dominant colour for a swatch
It is the most populated region of colour space, refined to the mean of its members — the only one of the four guaranteed to be a colour the image actually contains a lot of.
Take the linear mean for a background
It is the colour of the light the image emits, so it is what matches an ambient glow or extends the picture off the edge of a canvas.
Common questions
Why are the two means different colours?
Because sRGB bytes are not proportional to light. Averaging the bytes averages through a concave curve, which pulls the result towards the dark end; averaging in linear light and converting back does not. The gap between them is shown as a number.
The average is a grey that is nowhere in my photo.
That is what a mean does to a picture made of two very different regions. Use the median, which is per channel and robust, or the dominant colour — both return something the image actually contains.
I need more than one colour.
The palette extractor quantises the image and reports every entry with its share, which is the right tool for a theme or a chart scale.
Feed it from
Palette Extractor
Pulls an N-colour palette out of an image and exports it as hex, CSS variables or an ASE swatch.
BlurHash / ThumbHash
Encodes an image into a short BlurHash or ThumbHash string for use as a loading placeholder.
PNG Compressor
Quantises the palette and rewrites the deflate stream to shrink a PNG without changing its dimensions.
JPEG Compressor
Re-encodes a JPEG at a chosen quality with a live before/after size and a difference view.
Next
These accept what this tool produces, so the result can go straight in.
BlurHash / ThumbHash
Encodes an image into a short BlurHash or ThumbHash string for use as a loading placeholder.
Colour Format Converter
Converts a colour between HEX, RGB, HSL, HWB, LAB, LCH and OKLCH and names the nearest known colour.
Contrast Checker
Scores a foreground and background pair against WCAG 2 and APCA and suggests the nearest passing colour.
Palette Extractor
Pulls an N-colour palette out of an image and exports it as hex, CSS variables or an ASE swatch.
Colour Picker
Picks a colour on an OKLCH field, with a screen eyedropper or from an uploaded image, and copies it in any notation.
Currency Converter
Converts between about thirty currencies at the ECB’s daily reference rates, crossed through the euro, or at a rate you type in.