Palette Cleaner

Paste a list of colors to remove duplicates and visually similar shades.

About Color Palette Cleaner

Optimize and refine your color palettes by removing redundant colors, fixing inconsistencies, and organizing colors for better usability. Clean up messy palettes extracted from images or created through multiple iterations to achieve cohesive, professional color schemes.

Perfect for designers working with large color sets who need to streamline their palettes, remove near-duplicates, and establish clear color relationships for brand consistency and design efficiency.

Smart Cleaning Features

Duplicate Detection

Automatically identify and remove exact duplicates and near-identical colors based on configurable similarity thresholds.

Color Clustering

Group similar colors together and select representative colors from each cluster to reduce palette complexity.

Contrast Optimization

Remove colors that don't provide sufficient contrast with others, ensuring your palette supports accessibility requirements.

Harmony Analysis

Identify and remove colors that break color harmony rules, keeping only colors that work well together.

Organization & Sorting

Intelligent Sorting

Automatically sort colors by hue, saturation, lightness, or perceived brightness to create logical color progressions.

Role Assignment

Categorize colors into primary, secondary, accent, neutral, and background roles based on their properties and relationships.

Usage Frequency

Analyze color frequency in extracted palettes and prioritize the most commonly occurring colors for cleaner results.

Format Standardization

Ensure all colors follow consistent naming conventions and format standards across your design system.

Common Use Cases

Image Palette Refinement

Clean up extracted color palettes from photos or artwork to remove noise and focus on dominant, meaningful colors.

Brand Color Auditing

Review and consolidate brand color collections that have grown inconsistent over time across different projects.

Design System Cleanup

Optimize design system color tokens by removing unused colors and establishing clear hierarchies and relationships.

Accessibility Compliance

Remove colors that fail accessibility standards and ensure remaining colors provide adequate contrast ratios.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does the tool determine which colors to remove?

The cleaner uses advanced algorithms to analyze color similarity, contrast ratios, harmony rules, and usage frequency to make intelligent decisions about which colors to keep or remove.

Can I adjust the cleaning sensitivity?

Yes, you can configure similarity thresholds, minimum contrast requirements, and other parameters to control how aggressively the tool cleans your palette.

Will important colors be accidentally removed?

The tool prioritizes preserving colors with unique characteristics and good contrast ratios. You can also mark specific colors as "protected" to prevent their removal.

What's the recommended palette size after cleaning?

This depends on your use case, but typically 5-12 colors provide good balance between variety and usability. The tool can target specific palette sizes based on your needs.