PaletteSnape FAQ

A1: A colour palette tool that runs in your browser. It pulls the dominant colours out of a picture, builds a palette from a base colour with six harmonies, or finds any of the 148 named colours; shows shades, gradients, a contrast checker and a colour blindness preview for the palette; saves palettes in the browser; and exports them as CSS variables, SCSS variables, a Tailwind config, JSON design tokens or a PNG strip. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account.

A2: Nothing. There is no plan, no limit and no feature held back. Like every page on ZeroDataUpload, the tool is supported by advertising.

A3: No. There is no registration and no login. Drop a picture or pick a colour and the palette fills.

A4: Yes. The cards stack one above the other, the pickers open the phone's own colour chooser, a photo can be chosen from the camera roll, and the swatches and shades are sized for a thumb. Pasting a picture needs a browser that supports pasting files, which most phone browsers do not; choosing one works everywhere.

A5: First it works on a small copy, about 120 pixels across, so large photos stay quick. Each pixel's colour is rounded to a coarse grid (32 levels per channel) and the rounded colours are tallied. Starting from the most frequent, the tool keeps a colour only when it differs clearly from those already chosen; if that leaves too few, it loosens the rule and goes through the list again. Fully transparent pixels are ignored. What you get are the colours that dominate the picture rather than a complete inventory.

A6: Anything the browser can show: JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF (the first frame), BMP and, in most browsers, AVIF and SVG. Files up to 30 MB are accepted; the picture is shrunk before counting, so a large photo takes no longer than a small one. Drop it, choose it, or paste it from the clipboard.

A7: Each harmony is a rule for choosing colours by angle on the colour wheel, measured from your base colour. Complementary adds the opposite hue (180 degrees). Analogous adds close neighbours, 30 and 60 degrees each way. Triadic adds two hues a third of the wheel apart (120 degrees). Split-complementary uses the two hues beside the opposite one (150 and 210 degrees). Tetradic adds three hues at quarter turns (90 degrees). Monochromatic keeps one hue and varies only how light it is. Because saturation and lightness stay those of the base, the set looks consistent.

A8: It picks a random base colour with a usable saturation and lightness, applies a random harmony to it and replaces the palette, keeping any colours you have locked. Press it until something looks right, lock what you like, and press again.

A9: The 148 colour names every browser understands, from aliceblue to yellowgreen, by any part of the name (typing "sea" finds seagreen, seashell and the rest) or by a hex, which shows that colour with the nearest name. Each palette card also shows the nearest named colour, marked "(near)" when it is not exact.

A10: Ten. Extraction gives four to ten as you choose, harmonies two to five, and Add to palette adds one at a time until ten. Remove a colour with the cross on its card.

A11: A locked colour stays where it is when you press Random palette, Generate scheme or Extract again; only the unlocked colours are replaced. It is how you keep a brand colour and build the rest of the palette around it.

A12: Its hex is copied to the clipboard and the Shades card shows its eleven shades. The buttons under the card lock it, copy the hex, send it to the contrast checker as the text or the background colour, or remove it.

A13: The hue and saturation are kept and the lightness is set to eleven steps from 96% down to 9%, named 50, 100, 200 and so on to 950 as design systems name them. The step nearest the colour's own lightness is the colour itself and carries a dot. Click a shade to copy it.

A14: A linear gradient at any angle, a radial one from the centre, or a conic one starting at any angle, each using the palette's colours in order. The CSS line under the preview is the exact value to paste into a stylesheet.

A15: The ratio measures how far apart two colours are in brightness, on a scale from 1:1 (identical) to 21:1 (black against white). Under WCAG, ordinary body text needs 4.5:1 to pass level AA and 7:1 to pass AAA. Large text, roughly 24 pixels or 19 pixels in bold, is allowed lower ratios: 3:1 for AA and 4.5:1 for AAA. The checker reports all four results for the pair you enter.

A16: Use the buttons on the cards: the text button sends a colour to the checker as the text colour, the background button as the background. The swap button exchanges the two. You can also type any hex into either field.

A17: Treat it as a rough guide. Each type of colour blindness is imitated by blending the red, green and blue channels in a fixed way, as if one kind of cone were missing; achromatopsia is shown as plain greyscale. People differ, and many have only a mild form, so the preview tells you which colours might be confused, not exactly how anyone sees them.

A18: CSS variables: a :root block with --color-1 to --color-n. SCSS variables: $color-1 to $color-n. Tailwind config: a colours block for theme.extend with palette-1 to palette-n. Design tokens: JSON with each colour's hex, nearest name, RGB and HSL. PNG swatches: a downloaded strip of the colours with their hex codes and names. The code formats open in a window to copy or download.

A19: In your browser's storage on this device, under the tool's own name, up to fifty, each with its name and date. Save palette in the toolbar adds the current one; the saved list loads or deletes any of them. Nothing is sent to a server, there is no account and no sync.

A20: Export saved under the list writes them all to one file; Import on the other computer adds the file's palettes to the ones already there, skipping exact duplicates. The earlier version's saved palettes are also read on the first visit and carried over.

A21: No. A picture is read in your browser, drawn on a hidden canvas to count its colours and never sent anywhere; it is not saved with the palette, and closing the page discards it. Like every page on the site, the tool page shows ads through Google AdSense and uses Google Analytics; the Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy explain what those collect. Your pictures and palettes are never part of it.

A22: The picture really is mostly one colour, so the most common colours are near each other. Ask for fewer colours, or more: with more the tool relaxes how different they must be and reaches into the smaller areas of the picture. For a logo on a white background, white is usually the first colour; remove it with the cross.

A23: The clipboard must hold a picture, not a file path or a link; copy the picture itself (right-click, Copy image) and press Ctrl+V or Cmd+V with no field focused. Some browsers, and most phones, do not pass pictures to a web page; choose the file instead.

A24: Clipboard access needs a secure page and sometimes a permission; the tool falls back to an older copy method, and failing that shows the text so you can select and copy it yourself. The export window's Download file button avoids the clipboard altogether.

A25: The browser's site data was cleared, or this is a private window or another browser or profile. The tool has no copy anywhere else; Export saved now and then and keep the file.