Color intelligence guide

Help

Short answers to what goes wrong most often.

My picture did not open

The tool opens what your browser can show as an image: PNG, JPEG, GIF and WebP work everywhere. If the tool says That file is not an image this browser can read, save the picture as a PNG or JPEG and try again.

The palette changed when I did nothing new

The colors are found from a random start, so Resample, Colors (k), Reset and Try with sample can each give slightly different swatches and shares. Press Resample until you like the split, then copy it.

I asked for 16 colors and got fewer

A group that ends up with no pixels is dropped. A picture with few real colors, such as a logo, gives fewer swatches than Colors (k) asks for.

The harmony does not start from the first swatch

The wheel starts from the largest swatch with a clear hue: a saturation of at least 20% and a lightness from 10% to 90%. A dark background, as on the sample, is skipped, so the wheel starts from the red. Only when every swatch is grey, near black or near white does it start from the first swatch.

The contrast grid shows only six colors

The grid keeps to the first six swatches so it stays readable. Each row's color is the text; each column's color is the background. The diagonal shows the color itself. A struck-through badge is a fail. With fewer than two colors, the grid is hidden.

Vision did not change the swatches

That is on purpose. Vision redraws only the picture at the top, so you can compare it with the true colors below. The modes are simple color mixes, a quick guide rather than a medical test.

The mood reads dark on a colorful picture

The mood averages every pixel of the picture that is not see-through, so a large dark area pulls it dark. It calls the average hue warm from 0 to 60 and 300 to 360 degrees, cool from 180 to 270, and neutral otherwise or when the saturation is under 20%.

A transparent picture reads oddly

Mostly see-through pixels, with an alpha under half, are left out of the palette, the histogram and the mood. A picture with no solid pixels at all shows no palette, wheel or mood.

Is it slow with a big picture?

Rarely. Every reading is made from a copy at most 200 pixels on its longest side, and the palette uses every second pixel of that. Only opening a very large photo takes a moment.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes, with nothing left out. The controls sit in a bar at the bottom of the screen; tap it to open them. Swipe inside the frame to scroll through the readings. The shown picture is fitted to the screen.

Copy did nothing

Some browsers do not let a page write to the clipboard, and the tool says Copy failed. Copy image also fails before a picture has loaded. Try another browser, or copy hex codes by hand from the swatches.

Is my picture uploaded?

No. The picture is read on your device and never leaves it.

Why is a picture from another tool here?

Pictures you add are kept on this device for every lab tool that takes one, so you need not add them again. Press × on a tile to forget that picture; the logo the page opens with comes back.

Are there keyboard shortcuts?

The tool has none of its own. Anywhere in the lab, Ctrl K, or Cmd K on a Mac, opens the list of all tools.