jirenmaa / dominant_colours

A CLI tool to find the dominant colours in an image 🎨

dominant_colours

This is a command-line 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):

Installation

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.

Further reading

• 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.