Colour Palette Creator

I am sure that there are hundreds of tools like this on the web, but I thought it would be quite interesting to produce a colour palette based on an image. Imaging you are designing a website and you really like the colours used in a particular piece of art, then you've come to the right place. This software will extract the most common colours in an image, and also give you the average colour.

The method used to calculate these is very simple. To calculate the average colour, simply sum all the RGB components of each pixel and divide by the total number of pixels. I do this using bitwise operators where:

R = HEX >> 16 & 0xFF
G = HEX >> 8 & 0xFF
B = HEX & 0xFF

and HEX = (R<<16 | G<<8 | B), useful stuff!

To calculate the palette I create an accumulator array which counts the number of each colour in the image. Before using this I reduce the number of colours in the image using some simple math.

I hope you find it quite interesting to have a play around with, just click the image to launch it. You can load your own images from your local computer to play around with it.