Iridys Palette Extender is an advanced WordPress colour picker and palette-building plugin for site owners, designers, developers, agencies, and creative teams who need greater control over colour selection inside the dashboard. It replaces the standard WordPress colour picker with a richer interface across compatible theme settings, plugin options, editor controls, and other admin fields.

Rather than relying on a basic colour square and HEX field, Iridys provides several ways to select, adjust, compare, mix, and reuse colours without interrupting the normal WordPress workflow. The picker opens automatically whenever a supported colour field is selected.

Three interchangeable colour-selection surfaces are included. The Square combines saturation and brightness controls with a separate hue strip. The Hue-frame places the spectrum around a rectangular frame, making colour relationships and harmony positions easier to explore. The Sliders surface provides separate hue, saturation, and brightness controls for more precise adjustment.

Users can switch between these surfaces without changing the selected colour. The picker also includes a live preview, direct value entry, and support for HEX, RGB, and HSL formats. Colours can be typed manually, copied from another source, adjusted visually, or sampled from anywhere visible on screen using the browser-supported eyedropper.

Iridys performs its colour calculations in OKLCH, a modern colour space designed to create cleaner transitions and more visually balanced results. This helps prevent the dull or muddy intermediate colours that can appear when blending between different hues using less perceptually consistent colour systems.

The built-in Palette tab provides a temporary workspace for the current session. Users can add the active colour, collect colours from the image tools, select stored swatches, compare alternatives, and remove colours that are no longer required.

The Mixer contains two customisable colour strips. Each strip blends between a selected start and end colour, displaying the complete range between them. The first begins with the current colour blending towards white, making it useful for lighter tints. The second begins with black blending towards the current colour, providing darker shades and tones.

Either endpoint can be replaced with any selected colour, allowing users to create custom transitions such as grey to white, blue to green, or teal to orange. Each strip can be reset independently, and its default current-colour endpoint continues to follow the active picker colour until it is manually replaced.

The Scheme tools generate balanced harmonies from the selected base colour. Complementary, analogous, triadic, and other schemes can be displayed directly on the Hue-frame as positioned colour markers. The base colour remains visually distinct, while the related colours appear around it according to their hue relationships.

Complete harmony sets can be captured into the Scheme tab, where each colour can be selected and used in the picker. This makes it easier to build coordinated groups for backgrounds, buttons, headings, accents, illustrations, charts, product graphics, and wider brand systems.

Iridys also includes tools for extracting colours from images. Pick from Image lets users load an image into a private browser-based workspace and inspect it with a magnifier. The colour beneath the cursor updates live, and clicking captures it for use in the picker or session palette.

Dominant Colours analyses an image and identifies the colours contributing most strongly to its appearance. Results are shown as a proportional palette ribbon, with the most frequently used colours presented first. Users can choose how many colours to extract, select individual results, or add the complete palette.

These tools can be used with photographs, illustrations, screenshots, logos, interface designs, product images, packaging, and other visual references. Image analysis takes place locally in the browser, so source images are not uploaded to an external processing service.

Settings allow users to customise how Iridys appears throughout WordPress. An optional active indicator can be shown beside enhanced colour fields, with several marker styles available. The picker interface can also use rounded or square corners.

The free version includes the enhanced picker, all three surfaces, HEX, RGB and HSL input, the eyedropper, OKLCH colour handling, Mixer tools, balanced harmonies, Pick from Image, basic Dominant Colours extraction, session palettes, and nearest colour-name identification.

Iridys Palette Extender Pro adds persistent named palettes for reusable client, brand, website, campaign, product, and project collections. It also includes contrast and colour-blindness checks, advanced LAB and CMYK formats, colour-ramp export, and expanded Dominant Colours extraction and export tools. Pro is available as a one-time purchase for each major version.