How to find a film's color palette
A color palette is the handful of colors that define how a film or scene feels: the teal-and-orange of a summer blockbuster, the sickly greens of a thriller, the warm ambers of a period drama. Cinematographers, production designers and colorists build it on purpose, through locations, costume, set dressing, lighting and the grade.
This tool finds the palette of any frame. Open a still, a screenshot or a video, scrub to the moment you want, and it groups the frame's pixels into the colors that matter most. The percentage next to each one is how much of the frame it covers, so you can tell the base tones from the accents.
Using a palette in your own film
- Mood boards: put the palette strip next to reference frames so the whole crew sees the same target.
- Production design and costume: pick props, paint and wardrobe from the palette, and keep the accent color for the things that matter.
- Grading: compare your graded frames with the reference palette to check you're heading the right way.
- Titles and posters: the CSS and JSON exports give exact hex codes for design tools.
Tips
Choose fewer colors (four to six) for the overall grade, more (eight to twelve) to catch small accents. Sort "Dark to light" to read the contrast of a scene at a glance, or "By hue" to see the color scheme. Compare the same shot before and after your grade to see what the grade changed.
Where to go next
The course lesson Colour and look covers designing a palette for a film, and Set the look shows how MoviePro applies it to every generated shot. Plan the frame shape with the aspect ratio calculator.