Artists and photographers often need a clear understanding of the colors used in an image, but standard photo editor tools like the histogram do little to help.

Image Color Analyzer is a free Android app designed to deliver a clearer view of an image palette.

The target can be an existing file, or a new picture taken from your device camera.

Image Color Analyzer examines the colors used in your image, groups and sorts them from the most dominant to the least significant.

The report then gives you the breakdown of these shades, including their color names. You might see that the dominant color is “steel blue”, there’s “khaki”, some “cream”, whatever it might be. Each color has a percentage figure representing its usage.

Get a complete overview of your picture’s palette in seconds

Your image will probably have too wide a palette range for this to be useful on its own, but the app also organises similar shades into groups. If your image has 5% each of “ivory”, “canary yellow” and “cream”, for instance, Image Color Analyzer will show 15% usage for the “yellow” group.

While the color names bring some clarity, you’ll occasionally need the raw values as well, so it’s good to see that the app provides RGB and hex codes for every shade.

If you need more power – in particular, you’d like to save or do something more with this information – the developer also produces a $0.99 Professional edition with a histogram, “export to Excel” feature and other sharing options.

Image Color Analyzer is a free app for Android 3.0 and later.