Color Palette

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.