How to get a color palette from any image
Most tools that pull a color palette from an image hand you a row of equal swatches that hides the one thing which made the image work in the first place, which is how much of each color it actually holds. The feeling of an image lives in its proportions, and once you flatten them into matching squares you lose the very balance you were trying to borrow.
Iris measures the colors in your photo on your own device and sorts them into up to four roles, each with its name and hex code and its share of the image. The Anchor is the dark foundation that holds everything together, and the Energy is the most vivid color in the frame. The Atmosphere is the quieter light that lets the eye rest while the Anomaly is the small outlier that keeps the whole palette from going flat.
Open irisreads.app and choose any JPEG or PNG or WebP to read your own image, including any photo in your iPhone library. Iris reads it in a few seconds without your photo ever leaving your device and gives you a palette card to save along with your image with its colors set beside it.
You can see it done on Kandinsky's Improvisation No. 30, where warm stone fills more than half the canvas and a rail blue at 10% does the work of an accent.
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Examples
- Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons), 1913
- Utagawa Hiroshige, Mitsuke: Ferries Crossing the Tenryu River
- Polished river stones on black
- Storm clouds over mountain ridges at sunset
- A sea stack and cliffs on the coast, shot on film
- A turquoise and cream wall with grasses in late sun
- A snow-patched summit under storm clouds
- A train carriage vestibule with a red light leak
- A sunlit room with a terracotta tile floor
- A chapel interior with striped marble arches
- A full moon over a field at dusk, seen from the road