Colour Palette Extractor

What the harmony reading means

Colour harmony describes how far apart the dominant hues sit on the wheel. Complementary palettes put them opposite each other — the teal-and-orange split that dominates modern blockbusters. Analogous palettes keep everything within a narrow band, which reads as calm and unified but flat. Triadic palettes spread three families evenly and are the hardest to control. Split-complementary sits between the first two: an anchor hue answered by two colours flanking its opposite, which gives you most of the contrast with less of the cliché.

Why the proportions matter more than the swatches

Most palette generators give you five equal blocks, which is misleading. A frame that's 70% muted blue-grey with a 4% burst of warm skin tone is a fundamentally different look from one that splits those colours evenly — even though both produce the same five swatches. The bar above is sized by actual pixel share, and the dots on the wheel scale the same way, so a small accent reads as a small accent. When you're reverse-engineering a look, the dominant neutral is usually doing more work than the colour you noticed first.

Going from a palette to a grade

A palette tells you where a look sits on the wheel, but it can't tell you how to get your own footage there — that depends on where your footage starts. The handoff above loads the palette's darkest and lightest hues into the editor as a split-tone, which gets you into the right neighbourhood to adjust by hand. For an actual match, open both images in the editor and use Color Match, which compares the two colour distributions and builds a LUT from the difference.

A note on accuracy

Colours are clustered in CIELAB rather than RGB, so swatches are grouped by how different they look rather than how different their numbers are. Swatches too grey to have a meaningful hue are marked neutral and left off the wheel — a near-monochrome frame has no harmony to report, and inventing one would be worse than saying so.