Uwarp

Pigment by ShapeFactory — a palette generator that mixes colour like pigment, not like maths

Pigment builds palettes by modelling light and pigment rather than rotating hues. Free, no account, HEX and RGB out — and no API or token export.

  • Color Palettes
  • Color Theory
  • Design Tools
  • Brand Colors
  • Free Tools
Publisher
ShapeFactory
Type
Color Palette Generator
Pricing
Free
Reviewed
19 September 2026
Official site

Quick verdict

Use when

  • You need a starting palette for a project and you want colours that already sit well together rather than a mathematically even ramp
  • You have a photograph — a product shot, a location, a piece of art — and you want the palette it implies rather than the palette you would guess at
  • You want one colour and its natural neighbours without working out the relationships yourself
  • You are choosing between two or three directions quickly and need something usable in the first thirty seconds
  • You want a palette tool that needs no account and sends nothing about your work anywhere

Skip when

  • You need design tokens, a JSON export or anything a build pipeline can consume; there is no API and no structured export here
  • You need a formal accessibility check — contrast has to be verified in a tool that actually computes it
  • You want deterministic control: an exact brand hex and its harmonised family, reproduced on demand
  • You are building a palette from an existing brand colour and need it to stay inside a defined system
  • You need to see the palette applied to a real interface before you commit to it, which is a preview tool rather than a generator

Try instead

If what you need is contrast checking, a palette shown in a real interface, or a wider set of colour tools, those live here too.

Pigment vs Coolors vs Adobe Color vs Realtime Colors

Four palette tools that are separated by one question: what happens between generating a palette and using it. Coolors is the category's default and by far the fastest to operate — space bar to shuffle, lock the colours you like, keep going — and it is the only one of the four with a fully realised lifecycle around a palette: cloud saving, a browsing community and trend gallery, image extraction, and export in formats a designer or a developer can actually take away, including stylesheet variables and Adobe swatch files, with a contrast checker that computes WCAG ratios. Adobe Color is the brand-system tool: a colour wheel with formal harmony rules, image extraction, WCAG 2.1 contrast analysis, and a direct path into the design software most teams already pay for, where palettes live as swatches that update across files. Realtime Colors approaches it from the opposite direction entirely — its value is not in generating colour but in showing it, applying a palette to a mock interface with real typography and components so you can see whether the text is readable and the surfaces work before anything is built, and it exports the result as variables and configuration. Pigment's position is narrower than all three and has one genuinely distinct mechanism. It does not rotate hues around a wheel; it models lighting and pigment, which produces palettes that read as mixed rather than computed, and a single lighting control moves the whole set together, which is a much faster way to explore a mood than repicking colours one at a time. A photo search generates a palette from a real image, so the result can be derived from material a project already uses. What it does not do is the second half of the job: there is no account, no saved library, no token export, no API and no contrast auditing, so the palette has to be carried out by hand and verified somewhere else. The practical summary is that Coolors and Adobe Color are where a palette is managed and shipped, Realtime Colors is where it is tested against an interface, and Pigment is where a palette with some taste comes from in the first place — a first-ten-minutes tool, which is either exactly what you need or a step you can skip.

Tap a dimension to focus

Pricing

Pigment leads
  • PigmentThis page
    • Free with no account, no signup and no usage limit
    • No paid tier, no credit system and nothing metered
    • One of a set of small free tools from the same studio, of which only a separate QR product is paid
    • Nothing to subscribe to, so there is no upgrade decision to make
  • Coolors
    • A free tier that covers generating, browsing and basic export
    • Paid tiers add unlimited saved palettes, more export formats and the project tools
    • Accounts are free, and a paid plan is what removes the limits on saved work
    • The free tier is genuinely usable rather than a countdown
  • Adobe Color
    • Free to generate, extract and check palettes
    • Saved palettes live in a Creative Cloud library, which is tied to an Adobe subscription
    • Automatic application of palettes to designs requires a paid plan
    • The cost is the ecosystem rather than the tool
  • Realtime Colors
    • Free to use, with no account required
    • Paid tiers exist around saved palettes and additional export options
    • The preview and export workflow is available without paying
    • No credit metering in the model
  1. Pigment by ShapeFactory — official site
  2. ShapeFactory — the studio behind Pigment
  3. ShapeFactory — the sibling gradient tool
  4. Coolors — official site
  5. Adobe Color — official site
  6. Realtime Colors — official site

Preview of Pigment - not the live app. Confirm details on the official site.

Does this overview help you decide?

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Learn more

Details below the decision summary—features, workflow, and scope notes.

What is Pigment?

Pigment builds palettes by modelling light and pigment rather than rotating hues. Free, no account, HEX and RGB out — and no API or token export.

What it costs

Nothing. It is free, there is no account, and it is one of a set of small free tools from the same studio.
Free tier
Yes
Pricing summary
This is a free tool with no account, no signup and no metered usage, and unlike most products in this category there is no paid tier to grow into — nothing is gated, and the free version is the whole product. It is also one of several small tools published by the same studio, a family that includes a logo generator, a gradient tool, a duotone filter and a separate QR product that is the only paid thing among them. That structure explains why the tool is shaped the way it is: it is a single-purpose page rather than a platform, with no library, no projects and no reason to make you sign in. What that costs you is not money but continuity, and it is worth being clear about because people are surprised by it. There is no saved history, so the palette you liked three days ago is gone unless you kept the hex values. There is no account to sync across machines. There is no API and no structured export, so nothing flows into a build pipeline or a design system automatically. There is no formal accessibility check, so contrast has to be confirmed somewhere else. And the terms describe the service as free and provided as-is, without a specific reuse licence for what you generate — which is the sort of thing that only matters if you are treating a generated palette as the seed of a brand rather than as a starting point for a mood board. None of that contradicts the price. It just means the free tier is free because the product is small, not because a larger version exists behind it. As with any small vendor tool, the terms are worth a read if you intend to build something commercial on the output, and the studio’s own pages are where to check them.

Reviewed on 19 September 2026 · ShapeFactory — the studio behind Pigment

What Pigment includes

The complete feature set, which is short by design — and worth reading in full before you adopt it.

  • A lighting model rather than a hue wheel

    Palettes are generated by modelling light and pigment instead of rotating a hue and stepping lightness, which is the studio’s own description of the mechanism and the entire reason to choose this tool over a dozen others. The visible consequence is that the colours relate to each other the way mixed paint does — shifting toward and away from a light source — rather than occupying evenly spaced positions on a wheel. Whether that is better is a matter of taste; that it is different is the point.

  • One control that moves the whole palette

    The interface is a palette and a lighting slider, and moving the slider reshapes every colour at once. That is a much better exploration model than adjusting swatches individually, because a palette is a relationship rather than a set of colours, and changing one member in isolation breaks the relationship. It also makes the tool fast in a way that is hard to appreciate until you have spent an afternoon nudging four hex values toward each other.

  • Palettes derived from photographs

    A search box takes a subject and returns a palette derived from a real image rather than from an algorithm alone. That matters when the project already has photography attached — a restaurant with a signature dish, a travel site with a destination, a product with packaging — because the palette then follows from material that is already part of the design instead of being invented next to it and needing to be reconciled later.

  • A palette of hex values you copy one at a time

    The output is a row of swatches with their hex values exposed, each copyable individually. That is the whole export path, and it is worth stating plainly: there is no stylesheet export, no design-token file and no structured format of any kind. For a designer working visually this is fine. For a developer expecting a palette tool to produce something a build can consume, it is a hard stop and worth knowing before you start.

  • No account, and nothing sent to a server

    There is no sign-in, no saved library and no project model, and the studio states that the free tools run client-side so your work does not reach its servers. The practical benefits are that nothing about a client project is transmitted and there is no profile to manage; the practical cost is that nothing persists. A palette is a thing you look at and copy, not a thing the tool remembers for you.

  • A place in a small family of free tools

    The same studio publishes a logo generator, a gradient tool built on roughly ninety perceptual presets with copyable stylesheet declarations, and a duotone filter, with a separately priced QR product as the only paid item. They share an aesthetic and a philosophy — small, single-purpose, free, no account — so if this one suits how you work, the others probably will too, and the gradient tool in particular is the natural companion when a palette needs a companion gradient.

  • No accessibility auditing, and no API

    These are the two most common reasons someone leaves a palette tool dissatisfied, so they belong in a feature list rather than only in a caveat. There is no contrast ratio readout and no formal WCAG check, which means any palette produced here must be validated in a tool that computes contrast before it is used for text. And there is no API or programmatic access, so the tool cannot be part of an automated pipeline at any point.

How to use Pigment without being stranded by it

The short workflow that works, and the four places it stops.

  1. Generate a dozen palettes before you judge any of them

    Because the whole palette moves with one control, the cost of exploring is close to zero, and the mistake is to evaluate the first result carefully. Move the lighting slider through its range, note the two or three directions that feel like the project, and only then start looking at individual values. This is the one behaviour the tool is genuinely better at than its competitors, and it rewards being used that way.

  2. If the project already has photography, start from the image

    Searching a relevant subject and deriving the palette from a photograph produces a starting point that is anchored in material the project already uses, which removes the reconciliation step later. Even a rough subject match is usually more useful than a blind generation, because the palette inherits the light and the material of something real rather than expressing a rule.

  3. Copy the hex values out immediately, because nothing is saved

    There is no library, no history and no account, so a palette exists only as long as the page does. Copy the values into the place they actually belong — a design file, a note, your token file — as soon as you have a direction you like. This is the single biggest practical difference from the account-based tools, and it catches people once and then never again.

  4. Assume the palette is a starting point rather than a specification

    A model-based generator gives you a set that feels right; it does not give you reproducible colours or a system. Before the palette goes anywhere near production, the values need to become deliberate: the background and text pairs chosen, the contrast checked, the dark-mode variants worked out, and the whole thing written down as tokens. Treat the generated palette as the brief for that work rather than a substitute for it.

  5. Verify contrast somewhere that computes it

    There is no accessibility auditing here, and a palette that looks harmonious is not automatically readable — a set can be beautiful and still fail on body text against a background. Run the pairs you intend to use through a contrast checker before you commit, and prefer to do it early while there is still freedom to move a colour rather than after the palette has spread through a design.

  6. Hand off the hex values, not the link

    Because there is no saved state, a link to the tool returns a different palette than the one you saw. Whoever is implementing the design needs the actual values rather than a reference to the page they came from — and for a developer expecting a token file, that handoff is the moment the limitation becomes real. Budget for it as a manual step rather than discovering it during implementation.

Who Pigment is for

The moments this tool actually maps onto.

  • Designers starting a project with no colour direction yet

    The clearest fit. At the beginning of a project, what is needed is not a precise palette but a direction with some taste in it, and the combination of an instant result and one control that moves the whole set makes arriving at two or three candidate directions a matter of minutes. The free price removes the decision to try it, and the absence of an account removes the setup.

  • Anyone whose palette should come from an image

    If a project is anchored by photography — a place, a product, a piece of artwork — deriving the palette from that material produces a result that feels belonging rather than adjacent. It is a specific advantage over wheel-based tools, which have no relationship to the image at all and leave you to reconcile the two afterwards.

  • People who find colour wheels intimidating

    Harmony rules require you to choose a relationship before you know what it looks like. A tool that shows you one result and lets you move it with a single control is a much gentler entry point, and it produces usable output without any theory. For someone whose job is not colour, that is the entire value.

  • Solo builders and small teams without a colour system

    When the palette is four values in a stylesheet and nobody is going to maintain a design system, the missing token export does not matter and the missing account does not matter. What matters is getting to something that looks deliberate in half an hour, and this is a fast route to that — with the caveat that a hand-verified contrast check still has to happen somewhere.

  • Agencies exploring several directions before a client meeting

    Because a palette costs nothing to generate and can be captured as a screenshot or a set of hex values, producing three distinct visual directions ahead of a conversation is quick work. The lack of saved state is not a problem in that situation, because the artefact being produced is the screenshot rather than a stored asset.

When Pigment is the right pick

Most palette tools answer the same question the same way: here is a wheel, or here is a shuffle button, and the colours are derived by moving hue and lightness around a colour space. That approach is predictable and controllable, and it is also why so many generated palettes look generated — evenly spaced, technically harmonious, and a little bit flat. Pigment takes a different route and models lighting and pigment instead, which produces sets that read as if they were mixed. The practical experience of that difference is one control: a lighting slider that moves the whole palette together. Rather than adjusting four colours until they agree, you move the light and watch the family shift, which is a far faster way to find a mood and much closer to how a designer would actually explore one. The photo search adds a second path in, deriving a palette from an image — which is the right move when a project already has a photograph, a product shot or a piece of art and the palette should follow from it rather than sit beside it. Where the tool stops is equally clear, and it is the reason this page spends as much space on the limits as on the mechanism. There is no account and no saved library, so nothing persists. There is no token export and no API, so the last mile is manual: you copy hex values and paste them into whatever system actually holds your colours. There is no contrast auditing, so accessibility is somebody else’s job. And because the generation is a model rather than a rule, it is not reproducible in the way a wheel-based tool is — you cannot dial in an exact brand colour and get its canonical family back. The honest way to place it is as a first-ten-minutes tool. When a project is starting and the palette is a direction rather than a specification, arriving at something with taste in half a minute is worth a great deal, and the free price removes the decision entirely. Once the palette has to become a system — tokens, contrast pairs, dark mode variants, a design file that stays in sync — you will move to a tool built for that, and the hex values you copied are what carry across. That handover is the workflow this tool fits, and it is a good one as long as nobody expects it to be both halves of the job.

What it is and what it will not do

The mechanism, the constraints, and the licensing question worth checking before you rely on the output.
A browser tool that runs client-side under a small studio
It is a single free page published by a small design studio as one of several tools, not a platform with an account model. The studio states that work does not reach its servers and that the tools run client-side, which is consistent with a product that has no sign-in and no saved state. The consequence is a genuinely small data footprint and a genuinely small product: there is nothing to synchronise because there is nothing being kept.
A perceptual model rather than a geometric harmony rule
The generation is based on modelling light and pigment, which is the studio’s own framing and what distinguishes it from the wheel-and-slider tools that dominate the category. The upside is output that reads as mixed rather than computed. The trade-off is control and reproducibility: a rule-based tool will give you an exact complementary or a specific tint of a defined brand colour on demand, and a model that is producing a harmonious family is not designed to be dialled to a specification.
Hex values are the output, and they are exposed in the page
The palette is presented as swatches with their hex codes available to copy, and the values are present in the page markup as well as on screen. That is the complete integration surface: there is no JSON endpoint, no design-token format, no stylesheet export and no API of any kind. Anything more structured than copied hex values has to be constructed by hand, which is the concrete limit this tool has in common with almost nothing else in the category.
No contrast checking, so verification is external
There is no WCAG readout and no accessibility auditing in the tool. A palette produced here must be checked against a contrast calculator before any of its pairs are used for text, and there is no indicator inside the tool to warn you when a combination is unreadable. This is the single most important gap for anyone producing a palette that will go into a real interface rather than a mood board.
The reuse licence for generated output is not spelled out
The studio describes its tools as free and provided as-is, and unlike an open-source component library it does not grant an explicit reuse licence for what the tool produces. For a mood board or a personal project this is academic; for a palette intended as the foundation of a commercial brand it is worth reading the terms and deciding deliberately rather than assuming. Nothing here suggests a restriction — it simply is not stated, and unstated is a different thing from permitted.
The brand name is shared with two unrelated things
Pigment is also the name of an enterprise business-planning platform and the ordinary word for the coloured particles in paint, ink and plastics, complete with its own technical vocabulary and classification codes. This page is about neither of those. The tool described here is a free browser-based palette generator published under a subdomain of a small studio, and anyone arriving with a question about financial planning software or artist materials has come to the wrong page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Quick answers about this tool—open a question to read more.