Palette Vault is a free color reference that runs entirely in your browser.
Picking colors is easy to start and hard to finish. You find a blue you like, then need three more that go with it, then a darker version for text, then you discover the pair you chose is unreadable. The site is built around those four moments.
Browse ready-made four-color palettes by mood - pastel, vintage, neon, sunset, night - or by color family. Categories come from what a palette actually measures as, not from a label somebody typed.
Open a color for its hex, RGB, HSL and OKLCH values, a scale of lighter and darker versions, contrast figures against white and black, and palettes built around it. The scale is the useful part: it hands you a working light and dark version instead of one isolated value.
Use the tools to make rather than pick. Build a palette around your own color with per-swatch locking. Pull the palette out of a photo. Combine a photo with its colors into one image for a moodboard or a pin. Check contrast against WCAG and get the nearest shade that passes. Move lightness, chroma and hue as separate sliders and see exactly where a color stops being displayable.
Everything is built in OKLCH, a color space designed so equal numeric steps look equal to the eye. That is why the scales step evenly, the gradients keep their color through the middle instead of going grey, and four colors on a card look related rather than merely different.
