Free tool · 3 free, then your email
Thumbnail colour palette extractor
Drop in a thumbnail and get the five colours it is built from, with hex codes you can reuse on the next one.
Nothing is uploaded. The image is read entirely in your browser.
Channels that look like one channel keep going back to the same five or six colours. Most creators never write theirs down. You pick a yellow in the editor, get near enough to last time, drift a shade further the upload after that, and a year later the shelf looks like six people made it. Every one of those thumbnails looked fine on the day it went up.
This reads the pixels of whatever you drop in and groups them into the five colours holding the most of the frame, using median cut, the quantisation that has been building GIF colour tables since the eighties. Each swatch comes back as a hex code, the share of the image it covers, and whether black or white text still reads on top of it. Save the codes once and the next thumbnail starts from the same five instead of from scratch.
The share figure is worth reading before the hex codes. It is the fastest way to find out that the brand colour you think you use is actually 3% of the frame, or that a background you never chose is half of it. Run it over your last five thumbnails and you get an honest picture of the palette you already have, which is usually a different thing from the palette you meant to have.
Frequently asked questions
- How does it pick the five colours?
- Median cut, the quantisation photo editors have used for decades to build a GIF’s colour table. Every colour in the image starts in one box; the box spanning the widest range gets cut at the point where half its pixels sit either side, and that repeats until there are five boxes left. It is arithmetic on your pixels, so the same image always gives the same palette.
- Are these exact colours from my image?
- Yes. Each swatch is a real pixel, the one sitting closest to the centre of its group. Averaging the group instead would hand you a colour the thumbnail never contained. Paste any hex back into your editor and you are using something that was already there.
- Why is the colour I can clearly see missing?
- Because the palette is weighted by how much of the frame each colour covers. A bright accent on 2% of the image loses its slot to a muted background filling half of it. That is worth knowing on its own: if your brand colour never makes the five, it is not carrying the thumbnail.
- What is the contrast number for?
- It is the WCAG contrast ratio of black or white text on that colour, and it shows whichever of the two wins. Thumbnails are not web pages, so treat it as a guide rather than a rule: anything under about 3:1 stops being readable once the thumbnail shrinks to feed size.
- Why did it return fewer than five?
- Because the image genuinely has fewer. A two-colour logo on a flat background has two, and padding the row with near-identical greys would be inventing a palette instead of reading one.
- Is my thumbnail uploaded anywhere?
- No. The file is read in your browser and never leaves your device. PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, and AVIF all work, at any size.
- Is it really free?
- Three thumbnails without an account. After that a single email unlocks it for good, with no card and no cap. Reading the same image twice never costs a second go.
This tool lives inside Chewbr
Chewbr does colour checks like this at the packaging step, plus the other 46 jobs between filmed and published.
The full app is the finishing system for YouTubers: every video gets a 47-step checklist from Plan to Promote, with tools like this one built into the step where you need them. It has not launched yet, so join the waitlist and you will be first through the door.