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.

Official Links