dominant_colours

This is a tool for finding the dominant colours of an image. It prints their hex codes to the terminal, along with a preview of the colour (in terminals that support ANSI escape codes):

It's available both as a command-line tool and as a web app.

Installation

You can download compiled binaries from the GitHub releases.

Alternatively, you can install from source. You need Rust installed; I recommend using Rustup. Then clone this repository and compile the code:

$ git clone "https://github.com/alexwlchan/dominant_colours.git"
$ cd dominant_colours
$ cargo install --path .

Usage examples

Pass the path of an image you want to look at:

$ dominant_colours /path/to/cats.jpg
▇ #d0c6b2
▇ #3f3336
▇ #f3f2ee
▇ #786356
▇ #aa9781

By default, it finds (up to) five dominant colours. If you want more or less, pass the --max-colours flag. For example:

$ dominant_colours /path/to/corgis.jpg --max-colours=3
▇ #7c8442
▇ #ccbe8f
▇ #2d320e

The colours are printed as hex codes, with colour previews in your terminal. If you just want the hex codes and no colour preview, pass the --no-palette flag:

$ dominant_colours /path/to/crustaceans.png --no-palette
#e6401b
#be5e36
#734f48
#d6c0bd
#b1948f

This is useful if your terminal doesn't support ANSI escape codes, or you're passing the output to another tool.

It currently supports JPEGs, PNGs, and GIFs (including animated GIFs).

Wrapper functions in other languages

One of the reasons I wrote dominant_colours as a standalone binary was to allow me to write all the fiddly colour logic once, and then I can call it with thin wrapper functions from other languages.

So far I've only done this from Python, but the option is there! I'll put any of these wrapper functions I write below (or add your own in a PR):

Python

import subprocess


def dominant_colours(path, *, max_colours=5):
    """
    Get the dominant colours of an image.
    
    Returns the colours as RGB tuples of 0-255 values,
    e.g. red is (255, 0, 0).
    """
    cmd = ["dominant_colours", path, f"--max-colours={max_colours}", "--no-palette"]
    output = subprocess.check_output(cmd)

    colours = []

    for line in output.splitlines():
        colours.append((
            int(line[1:3], 16),
            int(line[3:5], 16),
            int(line[5:7], 16),
        ))

    return colours

Further reading

• I've written an accompanying blog post that talks more about the motivation behind the tool, a high-level overview of how it works, and why I chose to write it in Rust.

• Getting a tint colour from an image with Python and k-means – a blog post I wrote in August 2019 explaining how to find dominant colours.

  My original implementation was in Python. I've replaced it with a standalone Rust tool so I can easily share it across multiple projects, and because Rust is noticeably faster for this sort of thing.

• Collyn O'Kane's kmeans-colors project – a Rust command-line tool and library for finding the average colours in an image using k-means.

  The command-line tool has a lot of features, more than I need. I wanted a very simple tool that does one thing, so I wrote dominant_colours as a wrapper around the library.

• Drawing coloured squares/text in my terminal with Python – a blog post I wrote in April 2021 explaining how to use ANSI escape codes to print arbitrary colours in a terminal.

  I used the same escape codes to get the coloured output in this tool.

License

MIT.