Is there a tool to extract the primarily used colors in a picture?

Question

I was wondering if there is a tool that can identify all primarily used colors in a picture and show me a list or color code?

Use the colour picker tool to sample the colours you want. Both programs have it. — Billy Kerr, Commented May 15, 2017 at 8:59
Thats not what I need, there's alot complex color varieties in pictures and it would take hours to collect them all with the eyedropper and you probably forget some.. — Adam Yanis, Commented May 15, 2017 at 9:13
It would depend on what the picture was. Potentially an RGB image could contain over 16 million colours. Even a list of tens of thousands of colours could be rather unwieldy. Is that really what you want, the colour of every unique RGB colour listed? It would take you hours/days to look through them all. — Billy Kerr, Commented May 15, 2017 at 10:18
If you want a tool to make colour palettes, kind of semi-automatically, then the adobe colour website colour(dot)adobe(dot)com allows you to use an uploaded image for that. It's not going to give you every single unique colour contained in an image however. — Billy Kerr, Commented May 15, 2017 at 10:28
Yes , I may have said it wrong by saying every unique color, I ment more like the most dominating colors in a picture. I was already looking on that color/kuler CC but I did not know you could upload images there aswell thanks. — Adam Yanis, Commented May 15, 2017 at 11:03

mayersdesign · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-15 09:52:43Z

5

You can do this directly in Photoshop!

Select an Image
Open "Save For Web"
Select "GIF Restrictive" from the dropdown labelled "Preset"
Select how many colours to include in the top right field labelled "colours". Sixteen is probably a good starting point. Or else just try leaving it on "auto".
Save Your colour table - Find the section labelled "Colour Table". You can see that as it literally has the extracted colours in it already, (see image). On the top right hand side of this section you will see an icon that has three horizontal lines. Click this icon and select "Save Colour Table". This will prompt you to save a .act file.
Load Your Colour Table - Now all you have to do is load the colour table you just saved on what ever project you would like to work on. To do this, open the swatch window, then click on the icon that has three horizontal lines in the top right and click "Load Swatches".

Also Adobe Kuler has some cool functionality for doing this. Just hit the camera icon top right "Create from image". But it seems pretty limited:

answered May 15, 2017 at 9:46

mayersdesign

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Worth noting that you're limited to 256 colors with this method (OP said "all unique colors")
– Cai
Commented May 15, 2017 at 10:00
That's true, I kind of read it wrong. But all the same I am confident he "meant" to ask the question I have answered haha, unless he's working on some kind of algorithm or something? Ah, actually he says "can use them in Photoshop" so again, unless he is (seriously) hardcore scripting, I think I'm ok haha.
– mayersdesign
Commented May 15, 2017 at 10:16
Sure, it's a good answer regardless just thought it was worth noting :)
– Cai
Commented May 15, 2017 at 10:21
Thanks that's what I was looking for, maybe saying every unique color was a bit over exaggerating of me.
– Adam Yanis
Commented May 15, 2017 at 11:01
haha that's great, although now you have me thinking how to do that....but back to work! ;)
– mayersdesign
Commented May 15, 2017 at 11:11

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