Palettes from pictures

Open a picture with the picture button in the control row, or drop an image file onto the palette window. It sits above the palette at a tenth, a quarter or a half of the window’s height, set from the menu beside its filename, so you can give it more room while you’re working and less when you are not.

The picture is never kept

It’s read into memory, sampled, and held only while it’s on show. Nothing about it’s stored, linked or written anywhere: not a copy, not a thumbnail, not a path back to the original.

Saving the palette saves the colours, never the picture. Once you dismiss it or quit, Suisai knows nothing of it: reopening with Where I left off brings back the colours and not the picture.

Nothing is uploaded, and there’s no account.

Three ways to extract

Suisai finds between one and twelve colours, by one of three strategies:

• Dominant: what the picture is mostly made of. On a photograph with a large sky and a large stretch of ground, this is the one that reports the ground truth of the frame.
• Vibrant: the most saturated colours that still cover real ground. Small bright things are skipped unless they hold some of the picture.
• Spread: the colours furthest apart, so a harbour photograph isn’t five blues. This is the one that finds the single red door in a grey street.

Whichever you choose, every colour returned is a real cluster of the picture rather than an average of one, and no two come back as near-duplicates of each other.

The + control adds another extracted colour while a picture is loaded, up to twelve.

Side by side, if you would rather compare them at rest:

Pins

Click anywhere on the picture to pin a colour at that spot. ⌥-click a pin to remove it. Every extracted colour carries a pin showing where it came from.

The picture window

Enlarge opens the picture at working size. Zoom with ⌘+ and ⌘−, ⌘0 to fit, or from the zoom menu in the corner, which also offers Fit. Pan with ⇧-drag or the middle button.

The extraction controls come with it: Dominant, Vibrant and Spread and the colour count are all there, so you can work at the larger size and only go back when you’re done. Replace swaps the picture, and Done returns you to the palette.