Color Thief

Color Thief

Color Thief is an open-source JavaScript library that extracts the dominant colors from an image. It's lightweight, fast, and easy to integrate into any web project that needs to dynamically find prominent colors.
Color Thief image
color image javascript library open-source

Color Thief: Extract Dominant Colors

Open-source JavaScript library extracting dominant colors from images, lightweight and easy to integrate

What is Color Thief?

Color Thief is an open-source JavaScript library developed by Lokesh Dhakar that analyzes the dominant colors in an image and returns them in different formats. It works by using a clustering algorithm to find the most prominent colors in the image based on their frequency and density.

Some key features of Color Thief include:

  • Lightweight at only 1KB minified and gzipped
  • Extracts up to 10 dominant colors from an image
  • Returns colors in various formats like RGB, hex, HSL, or names
  • Fast performance even on large images
  • No dependencies making it easy to integrate
  • Can work with cross-origin images
  • Actively maintained on GitHub

Color Thief is useful for any application where you want to dynamically pull a color scheme from an image. For example, generating palettes for data visualizations based on photos, using colors from images in page layouts and themes, creating color pickers, building custom image filters, and more.

As an open-source JavaScript library, Color Thief is free to use and modify within the terms of the MIT License. It works in all modern web browsers and has an active open source community contributing on GitHub.

Color Thief Features

Features

  1. Extracts dominant colors from images
  2. Works on canvas, image tags, videos and image URLs
  3. Fast and lightweight
  4. Written in JavaScript
  5. Open source and free to use

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Simple API

Small file size

Good performance

No dependencies

Actively maintained

Cons

Limited to 5 color palette

Not optimized for all image types

Basic documentation

Lacks some advanced features


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