Certain applications require the extraction of patches of color from an image, their size and location. These applications may be: color harmonization algorithms1, non-photorealistic rendering2, etc. These applications use not too big a palette of colors, and in both cases large areas of homogeneous color are favored along with high detail preserved in the smaller areas with a lot of color activity. The main problem this paper will tackle is to identify the underlying color in an image region, which will be referred to as its underlying color patch, and also try to protect as much as possible the high color activity detail areas. No perfect scene object segmentation is intended in this process, since different objects may be quantized to the same color, the result may be a merged color patch. Notes: Published in SPIE Visual Communications and Image Processing, 15-19 January 2006, San Jose, CA, USA 12 Pages