What you get from a PDF color palette
Upload a brochure, a brand guide, a slide deck or a report and the tool returns the colors it is built from: each one as a swatch with its hex code, RGB and HSL values, and the share of the rendered pages it covers. White paper is left out by default so the accent colors come first.
The palette is a starting point for a website, a presentation template or a design system that has to match an existing document. If the PDF also carries photos or logos you want to reuse, Extract Images from PDF pulls those out as files.
Rendered colors and declared colors
Two readings are combined. The pages are rendered and every pixel is counted, which captures photographs, gradients and scanned artwork. Separately, the drawing instructions inside the PDF are read for the exact fill and stroke colors the designer set on shapes and text.
A swatch marked "declared" carries the precise value from the file, not an average of pixels, so it is the one to copy into a style sheet. A swatch marked "rendered" only comes from images or gradients, where no single exact value exists.
Export formats
| Format | Where it fits |
|---|---|
| CSS variables | A :root block with --color-1, --color-2 and so on, ready to paste into any style sheet. |
| SCSS | Sass variables for projects that compile their styles. |
| JSON | Name, hex, RGB, HSL, coverage and source for each color, for design tokens or scripts. |
| Tailwind | A theme.extend.colors block for tailwind.config.js, so the colors become utility classes. |
How to extract colors from a PDF
- Select a PDF. The pages are rendered in your browser and scanned one by one.
- Pick how many colors you want and whether white paper should be ignored. The palette updates instantly.
- Click a swatch to copy its hex code.
- Choose CSS, SCSS, JSON or Tailwind and copy the code or download it as a file named after your PDF.
What to expect
Colors are read from the first thirty pages, which is enough for a brand guide or a deck; very long reports are sampled from their opening pages. Similar shades are grouped so that anti-aliasing does not produce dozens of near-duplicates, and the coverage percentages describe the rendered pages, not the number of times a color is used.
Colors defined through spot-color patterns, shadings or ICC profiles are captured only as rendered pixels. Password-protected PDFs cannot be opened here; run them through Unlock PDF first. To keep a whole page as an image at a chosen resolution, use PDF to PNG.