About ImgHex

ImgHex is a free image color picker. You give it a picture, it tells you the exact color of any pixel you point at, and it can pull out the palette that defines the whole image. That is the entire scope, deliberately.

Why it exists

Tools for this already exist, and most of them work — but they tend to accumulate the things that make free web tools unpleasant: interstitial ads, a limit of a few uses before you are asked to watch something, an account prompt for a feature that needs no account, or a picker so imprecise that hitting the pixel you meant takes several tries.

This is an attempt at the same job without those. No signup, no usage cap, no watermark on exports, and a magnifier so that picking an exact pixel is straightforward the first time.

How it works

Everything runs in your browser. Images are decoded with the standard Canvas API, pixel values are read from that canvas directly, and palette extraction runs in a Web Worker so the interface stays responsive while it works.

Palettes are produced by k-means clustering in OKLab, a perceptually uniform color space. Clustering in plain RGB — which is the common shortcut — merges colors that look clearly different to a person, which is why automatically generated palettes so often come out muddy. Working in OKLab keeps the extracted colors as vivid as the image they came from.

Results are deterministic: the clustering is seeded rather than random, so the same image always yields the same palette instead of changing on every reload.

Privacy

Your images are never uploaded, because there is no server-side processing to upload them to. Nothing leaves your device, there is no account, and no image history is kept anywhere. That makes the tool usable for client work under NDA and for designs that have not shipped yet.

Built with

Astro for static HTML, one React island for the interactive tool, Tailwind CSS for styling, and Cloudflare for hosting. The pages you read are plain prerendered HTML — the JavaScript loads only for the picker itself.