Save a Colour Card as an Image: Export Sizes, P3 and the Free-Tier Watermark

The short answer

Tinta saves your colour card as an image, not a screenshot, and there are three export tiers: JPEG · 2K (2048px on the long edge) on the free tier, JPEG · 4K (3840px) on Pro, and PNG · Lossless (up to 6144px) on Pro. Every tier can be written in P3 wide gamut with an embedded ICC profile — that toggle is not a Pro feature. What Pro changes is the two things that scale with resolution, and it removes the small Made with Tinta badge that four of the mounts carry on a free export.

If you want the whole answer in one line: pick PNG · Lossless whenever the card is going to print or into a design tool, and JPEG · 4K when it is going to a phone screen or a social feed. Tinta renders the whole export on your device.

Why the searcher is here

The query behind "save colour palette as image" is almost never really about saving a file. It is one of two things:

• "I found the colour, now I want it out of this app." You have a palette you like and need the values in a design tool, a moodboard, or a message to a decorator. That is an export-format question, and the format is the whole answer.
• "I want something I can keep or give away." A palette on a screen is a note to yourself. A mounted card is a keepsake — something you would print, or post because it looks composed rather than screenshotted. That is a rendering question, and resolution is only half of it.

Most tools answer the second question by giving you a flat rectangle of swatches with your HEX underneath — a palette, not a card. The premise here is that the card is the export, so this page is about the difference between a card and the file you get when you screenshot one.

The three export tiers, concretely

Tinta writes at most three formats, all sized by the long edge of the card:

Three details are worth knowing because competitor pages rarely mention them:

• "Up to 4K" is the middle option, not the ceiling. The largest file is a 6144px lossless PNG, and the export sheet labels it with that number rather than calling it 4K. Marketing copy rounds; the tier list does not.
• JPEG is lossy in two ways at once. Grain is an editable control in the studio, and lossy compression on top of a grainy image is exactly what turns fine texture into mush. If you have dialled the grain up, that is your cue to export PNG.
• There is no HEIC and no RAW option. The lossless PNG is the archival tier, and the extension matches the format — .jpg for the two JPEG tiers, .png for the lossless one.

Why P3 and the ICC profile are not a luxury

The colour picker on the export sheet writes either standard sRGB or P3 wide gamut with an embedded ICC profile, on every tier. This is the part that separates a colour card from a colour screenshot:

• sRGB is what most of the internet assumes. A saturated rust gets clipped into sRGB somewhere along the way — in a JPEG re-encode, in an app that ignores the profile, in a printer that assumes sRGB — and comes out duller than the value on your card. P3 keeps the saturation, and the ICC profile tells a capable app what it is looking at.
• Not every app honours it. An older editor or a consumer print kiosk may ignore the profile and show you something flatter. That is the profile being dropped, not the colour being wrong.

Keep P3 on when the card is a keepsake or goes to a designer; turn it off when the destination is a plain sRGB feed.

The free tier is not "a preview" — but it has two soft edges

The free tier is not a demo. You can extract a palette from any photo, use the core mounts, and export a card at 2048px — a long way past a screenshot. Two soft edges are worth knowing before you decide what to subscribe for:

• Four mounts carry a badge. Develop, Stub, Ladder and Diptych are limited-free: usable and exportable without paying, but the file gets a small attribution until Pro removes it. The export sheet exposes this as a toggle, so you can see exactly what Pro changes. The five permanently free mounts (Empty Margin, Spread, Reserve, Plate and the default) never show it, and the nine Pro-only mounts are locked outright.
• Resolution is the other half. P3, the ICC profile, the grain, the band ratio and the six aspect ratios are free. Pro is resolution plus the watermark.

Beyond that, Pro is an auto-renewing monthly or yearly subscription with a 7-day free trial for new subscribers; pricing is shown live in the app. Cancellation is Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions, effective at the end of the period, with Pro active until then. A new device needs no account — the paywall's Restore Purchase re-checks your Apple ID.

Six ratios, and which one each is actually for

The aspect ratio is a first-class choice, not a crop you discover later. Six are offered:

• 3:4 and 4:3 — the general-purpose card shapes; 3:4 for a print, 4:3 for a landscape frame.
• 1:1 — the square, for the grid. 9:16 — Stories and phone backgrounds.
• 16:9 — a slide or a wide banner. 1.91:1 — the wide social crop.

Because the export sizes by the long edge, choosing a wide ratio trades away vertical resolution rather than throwing pixels at the short side. Pick the ratio for where the card is going, not to get more pixels.

A card vs. a screenshot vs. a generic colour-picker export

The obvious alternatives are "screenshot the studio" and "run the colours through a free palette extractor." Both fail on the same axis:

• A screenshot is a screen capture. It is as sharp as the preview, it is a UI image with the app chrome in it, and it has no colour management — so the moment it leaves the device, its colour is whatever the receiving app assumes.
• A generic extractor gives you swatches, not an object. No mount, no grain, no ratio, no typography, nothing to print. Right tool if all you need is five HEX values for a stylesheet, wrong tool if you wanted something you'd hang.

That distinction only matters if you were going to keep or print the result. If you only wanted the values, the hex-code page is the more direct route and this page is the wrong one for you — which is a fine reason to stop here.

What Tinta does differently, and where it stops

The differentiator is that the card is the product and the export is a tiered render of it, not an afterthought bolted onto a colour picker:

• Eighteen editorial mounts — instant, film strip, window, postmark, diptych, spread, deckle edge and more — change how the same palette reads without touching the values. One swipe changes the whole mood.
• Every swatch carries its exact HEX, and the chips are draggable and rearranged until the card feels right; harmony suggestions appear when you want a coordinated set rather than a sample.
• Print-grade output: up to 6144px lossless PNG with P3 wide gamut and an ICC profile, clean edges and real optical grain. At 3840px across a 4-inch print you are at roughly 240 dpi; at6144px across 6 inches, still over 250 dpi. That is print, not "fine for the grid".
• Fully on-device. No account, no ads, no tracking SDKs, no cloud; your photos never leave the phone, and even the place a photo was taken is resolved from an offline gazetteer rather than sent anywhere.

Where it stops, honestly:

• 6144px is the ceiling, and it is a ceiling on the long edge. A poster or metre-wide print needs a 1200-dpi source, which no phone-app export gives you.
• Live Photos can be turned into an animated Live Sticker on the card, but the export step needs photo-library permission and can fail without it.
• P3 is only as good as the destination. If the app or print shop you send the card to ignores the ICC profile, the colour comes back flatter, and no export setting fixes that.
• There is no product-matching. The app tells you the colour that is in the photo with its exact HEX; it does not tell you which paint, fabric or Pantone reference to buy.

The decision you can now make

You know what the file contains, so the choice is short. If your cards are going to a chat, a moodboard or the grid, the free tier's 2048px JPEG with P3 and no mandatory badge on the five core mounts is genuinely enough, and you can decide about Pro later. If you are printing, handing a card to a designer, or you have dialled the grain up and want it to survive enlargement, the Pro 4K JPEG or the 6144px lossless PNG is what makes the difference, and the 7-day trial is the cheapest way to find out which one you would have used.

Tinta is free to try on the App Store — every export is rendered on your phone in seconds, with no account and nothing uploaded.