How do I get one combined palette from several photos of my new collection?

Why one palette per photo falls short

You could extract a palette from each photo separately, but you would end up with five palettes full of similar colors with slightly different codes, and no way to say which beige is 'the collection beige'. One palette from all the photos together counts shared colors once and gives each color its share of the whole collection. That is what you need for a launch banner or the collection page in your store.

Step one: the collage, set up right

1. Open the Image collage maker maker and add the collection photos, from 2 to 12 of them.
2. Set the gap between images to zero and the outer margin to zero. Any gap or margin is filled with the background color, and that color would show up in the palette as if it belonged to the collection.
3. Choose the 1:1 cell shape and the 'Crop to fill' mode, so every photo fills its cell with no empty space around it.
4. Save the collage as PNG, which is lossless. JPEG and WebP are saved at quality 92; the difference is small, but there is no reason to add it here.

Example: four photos in a square grid

Four product photos in two columns, an 800 px output width, zero gap, zero margin and square cells: the output is 800 × 800 px and each photo fills a 400 × 400 cell. Each photo is exactly a quarter of the area, so it contributes a quarter of the pixels to the color count. With six photos in three columns at 900 wide, the output is 900 × 600 and each cell 300 × 300, one sixth of the area per photo.

Step two: the extraction

1. Open the collage in the Image palette extractor extractor.
2. Ask for a few more colors than you would for one photo, say 6 to 8, since a collection holds more colors.
3. If the photos were shot on white, turn on 'Ignore near-white', or the backdrops will take the largest share.
4. Read the shares: a color with a big share appears across all the photos, a small share means it lives in just one.

Controlling the weight

Since weight follows area, you can steer it on purpose. If one piece is the star of the collection and you want its color to lead the palette, add two photos of it instead of one. And if one photo is a close-up full of color while another is a wide shot that is mostly background, expect the first to count for more even in equal cells, because the background in the second eats into its share.

Remember that an incomplete last row in the collage stretches its photos to fill the width by default, making them larger than the rest. For equal weights, pick a number of photos that fills the rows exactly, such as 4 in two columns or 6 in three.