Color Palette

Node type: utility:color_palette
Category: Data

Description

Turn a set of colours into every shape a workflow needs: a swatch SHEET (1024x1024 PNG, one labelled band per colour) to wire into a vision or image-edit model as a reference, a prompt-ready TEXT string ("#DBC089, #430510"), an ARRAY for a List Selector or an iterator, and JSON as { colors: [...] }. Three ways to fill it, resolved in this order: wire an IMAGE (a mood board or a photo) and the count dominant colours are extracted; else wire the palette JSON port, which takes a hex array, a plain string of hexes separated by commas / * / spaces, or the whole brand object from a Website Research node (it reads the palette field); else wire the text port; else the colours typed on the card. Hexes are normalised to uppercase #RRGGBB, de-duplicated, and kept in the order given; anything that is not a colour is dropped with a warning rather than guessed at, and a palette with no valid colours is refused instead of rendering an empty sheet. Pure local compute: no external model, 0 credits, and the sheet is content-addressed so re-running with the same colours re-uses the same file.

Canvas ports

These appear as port handles on the left side of the node.

ID	Label	Details
palette	Colors (JSON)	JSON
text	Colors (text)	TEXT
image	Image	IMAGE

Sidebar config

These render as form fields in the right-side config panel when the node is selected.

ID	Label	Details
count	Colors to extract from an image (2-12)	NUMBER
colors	Colors (typed, comma separated)	TEXT

Outputs

ID	Label	Type
image	Swatch Sheet	IMAGE
text	Hexes (text)	TEXT
array	Hexes (array)	ARRAY
json	Palette JSON	JSON

What it is for

A brand is a handful of colours, and every downstream surface wants them in a different shape. An image model wants to LOOK at them, a prompt wants a string, a List Selector wants an array, the compositor wants JSON. This node takes the colours once and emits all four, so nothing in between has to split a string or extract a field.

Three ways to fill it, in this order

1. Wire an image. A mood board, a product photo, a screenshot. The dominant colours are read out of it, count of them (2 to 12, default 5), most frequent first.
2. Wire the Colors port. It takes a hex array, a plain string of hexes separated by commas, *, or spaces, or the whole brand object a Website Research node produces, in which case it reads that object's palette field. There is a second TEXT port for the same job, because a TEXT output cannot connect to a JSON port.
3. Type them on the card. Click a band to open a colour picker and a hex box. This is the fallback and only the fallback: the moment a wire lands, the card goes read only and says where the colours came from, so a typed palette can never quietly shadow a wired one.

Hexes are normalised to uppercase #RRGGBB, duplicates are removed, and the order you gave is the order you get. #abc shorthand and #RRGGBBAA both work (the alpha is dropped). Anything that is not a colour is dropped and the card tells you which. A palette with no valid colours at all is refused with a message rather than rendering a blank sheet, because a blank sheet looks like a node that worked.

The four outputs

port	what you get
Swatch Sheet	a 1024x1024 PNG, one labelled band per colour, top to bottom
Hexes (text)	#DBC089, #430510, ..., ready to drop into a prompt
Hexes (array)	the list, for a List Selector or an iterator
Palette JSON	{ "colors": ["#DBC089", ...] }

The sheet is the interesting one. Wire it into an image edit model or a vision model as a reference image and you are telling it the palette in the only language it actually reads, rather than hoping it parses six hex codes out of a sentence.

Use the ARRAY output, not the text one, when you want to pick a single colour downstream. The Array node splits text on * by default and the text output is comma-joined, so that pairing needs splitBy set to a comma. The array port needs no split step at all.

Free, and why the file does not pile up

Nothing here calls a model. It parses, reads pixels, and paints a PNG locally, so it costs 0 credits and refreshes on its own whenever something upstream changes. That last part is why the sheet's filename is a hash of the colours in order: re-running with the same palette re-uses the file already on the CDN instead of uploading another copy of the same picture. Reorder the colours and you get a different picture and a different file, which is correct, because band order is part of what the sheet says.

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