Image Color Palette Scrambler

Color palette scrambling is an obfuscation technique that shuffles the mapping of colors in an image while preserving its spatial structure. Each pixel retains its position, but the color values are permuted according to a shuffled palette. The result is an image where the shapes, edges, textures, and composition remain clearly visible, but all colors are assigned incorrectly — creating a surreal, visually confusing effect. The process is fully reversible using the original palette order and the scrambling seed.

1. Upload & Palette Extraction: You upload an image (PNG, JPG, WebP, or GIF). The tool reads every pixel using the Canvas API and extracts all unique RGB color values into a palette. You can optionally reduce the palette size using color quantization for more dramatic effects.
2. Seed-Based Shuffling: The palette is shuffled using a Fisher-Yates algorithm seeded by your numeric input. The same seed always produces the identical permutation, making the scrambling deterministic and reproducible. Different seeds produce completely different color assignments.
3. Application & Restoration: Each pixel's original color is looked up in the palette and replaced with the scrambled equivalent. The original palette is preserved in memory, allowing lossless one-click restoration. You can also save the scrambled image and restore it later using the same seed.

• Structure Preservation: Unlike pixel-level scrambling that turns images into noise, palette scrambling keeps every shape, edge, line, and detail perfectly intact. The image remains immediately recognizable as the original subject — just with wildly incorrect colors.
• Deterministic & Reversible: The seeded random permutation ensures that the same input always produces the same output. Anyone with the original palette and seed can restore the original image losslessly. The palette mapping is a simple permutation — no data is lost.
• Artistic Value: Different seeds create unique artistic color schemes from the same image. Some permutations may look like psychedelic filters, others may resemble specific color grading styles. The creative possibilities are endless.

All image processing is performed entirely in your browser using the HTML5 Canvas API. Your images are never uploaded to any server. No data is stored, transmitted, or tracked. The tool works completely offline after the initial page load.

Limitations: Palette scrambling works best on images with a limited color palette (illustrations, logos, pixel art, low-color photography). Images with millions of unique colors (high-quality photographs) produce large palettes where each color appears only once — scrambling such palettes has minimal visual effect since every pixel gets a unique color anyway. The color quantization feature helps reduce very large palettes for more visible scrambling on photographs. Large images may cause slower processing depending on your device's memory and CPU.