Palettes from images

The short version: Drop an image onto the palettes window. Pick how many colors you want and which algorithm you trust. Save it as a new palette.

Opening the dialog

Three ways:

Click the menu bar icon and choose New Palette from Image…
From inside the palettes window, choose Add palette → From image…
Drop an image directly onto the palettes window and the dialog opens with the image already loaded. Fastest path.

You can load an image into the dialog by dropping a file, pasting one from the clipboard (Cmd-V), or clicking the drop area to browse. JPEG, PNG, TIFF, HEIC — anything macOS can decode.

Choosing how many colors

The slider goes from 2 to 24. More colors means a more nuanced palette but more chaff to filter through later. Start at 8–12 for a typical photo, drop to 4–6 if you want a tight, branded feel.

Picking an algorithm

ColorCopy ships three quantization algorithms. They each have a personality. Try a couple, save the one you like.

K-means — default. Iteratively groups pixels around k centroids. Tends to produce balanced, “average” colors. Best for most photos and gradients.
Median cut — the classic GIF palette algorithm. Recursively splits the color cube along its longest axis. Good for images with a few clearly distinct color zones.
Octree — partitions colors into an octree by RGB bits. Fast and predictable. Often surfaces highlight/shadow colors that K-means averages away.

None of these is “better” than the others. They’re tools. The same image will give you slightly different palettes from each, and that’s the point.

Sort order

Once ColorCopy has the colors, you can reorder them in the preview:

Frequency — most-common color first. The default. Mirrors what dominates the image.
Hue — rainbow order. Useful for “does this image actually have warm and cool zones?”
Lightness (light to dark) — pleasant for design swatch sheets.
Lightness (dark to light) — same, inverted.

Naming and saving

The palette name auto-fills from the image filename in title case (e.g. sunset_at_dunes.jpg becomes Sunset At Dunes). Edit it to whatever makes sense to you.

Click Save and the palette appears at the end of your library. From there it behaves exactly like any other palette: rename, reorganize, star swatches, export. See Palettes for the rest.

Tips

If your palette feels muddy, drop the color count or try octree.
For brand-mark extraction, crop the image down to just the logo first — algorithms can’t pick out a brand color from a whole photo.
For posters, screenshots, and UI mocks, all three algorithms tend to converge. Pick whichever sort order feels best.

Performance

Quantization runs off the main thread, so you can keep tweaking the controls and the preview updates as soon as a new pass completes. Very large images are downsampled automatically before quantization — you don’t need to resize them.

Palettes — what to do with the palette once it’s saved.
Import & export — export the extracted palette to .ase, CSS, PDF, etc.