Make a Color palette from image in Photoshop use in Aseprite

In this color palette tutorial, I'll show a few methods of getting a color palette out of an image. The easiest is getting a color table in Photoshop and I'll show how to use it in Aseprite. These are the methods that I use. If you have other options, please comment down below. (to Join my disco

Pulling a usable color palette out of a reference image is a common need for game art and pixel work. This guide covers two methods: Adobe Color, which is quick but capped at five colors, and a Photoshop technique that extracts as many colors as you want and exports a palette you can load directly into a sprite document.

Method one — Adobe Color Go to color.adobe.com. The main tool builds palettes from color theory rules — analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, and others — all derived from whichever core color you pick. Drag the core color around the wheel and the associated colors update to match. It's a good way to explore harmonies, but it starts from a color rather than from your artwork.

Extracting from an image in Adobe Color The more relevant feature is image upload. Under the Explore tab you can browse existing palettes, but the upload option lets you feed in your own reference image. Adobe analyzes it and returns the palette closest to the photo's dominant colors. From there you can save those colors to your Creative Cloud library and pull them into Photoshop, or use them in a sprite.

The limitation Adobe Color gives you five colors. For a general brand or UI palette that's often fine. For pixel art — where you might want sixteen or thirty-two carefully chosen values including all the shading steps — five is nowhere near enough. That's what the second method solves.

Method two — Step 1: Convert to indexed color Open your reference image in Photoshop and go to Image, Mode, Indexed Color. This is the mode that limits an image to a fixed number of colors, and the dialog is where you specify how many.

Step 2 — Choose the palette type and count The palette dropdown offers Local Selective (the default), Local Adaptive, and others. Adaptive is the preference here — it samples the actual distribution of colors in your image and builds the best-fitting set rather than fitting to a predetermined scheme. Then set the number of colors. Sixteen is a good working number for pixel art, but this is entirely yours to choose. Click OK and the image is reduced to that count.

Step 3 — Open the color table Go back to Image, Mode, Color Table. This displays the exact palette Photoshop derived from your image — every color it kept, laid out as a grid.

Step 4 — Save the palette Click Save in the Color Table dialog and give the file a name, such as purple palette. It saves as an .act file, Photoshop's color table format. That single file now holds your palette and can be reused in any project.

Step 5 — Load it into a sprite document Create a new image to work in, open the Color Table dialog again through the options icon, and choose Load Palette. Select the .act file you saved and click OK. Your extracted palette is now the active color table for the document, so every color you paint with is constrained to those values.

That constraint is the real benefit. Working from a locked palette derived from a reference image keeps a sprite internally consistent and stops the gradual color drift that happens when you pick colors one at a time by eye.