General > Resources
Pixels And Art Glossary
0xDB:
There is already a short entry for Indexed Image/Color.
Personally, I never gave Index Painting much explicit thought because in all pixel art tools I've used (starting with PaintMagic on the C64 and DPaintIII on the Amiga500), "Index Painting" (though it was not called that back then I think, it didn't seem to have a name then) was just the default or only mode the tools and hardware(like the C64) could even handle, so to me, that was always the natural way to go/think about pixel art.
With non-indexed modes around today however, "Index Painting"(what making Pixel Art really already always was imo) should indeed be mentioned separately, but I suggest in more than just one additional entry, broken down into more specific terms:
Index Painting (broad generalization goes into that with links to Dan's articles)
Pallete Swap (full and partial swaps, with examples like faction colors in strategy games or a number of "identical" grayscales for different elements like clothes for individual partial swaps per element)
Color Cycling (a special case of a number of "Pallete Effects")
Palette Structure (logical mapping between palette indices and objects those indices will be used for (skin colors, shoe colors, ... closely related to preparing something for effects like Color Cycling and partial or full Palette Swaps)
Pallete Effects (umbrella term for things like Color Cycling, Palette Swaps, Palette Fading)
The fact, that using automated tools ( "dirty" as they're often called) which cause mutations of affected pixels by color without caring about indices, are mostly unsuitable if Palette Structure is important for programmatic effects seems obvious but maybe it should be mentioned in an entry about "'Dirty' Tools" without condemning them as forbidden though, just to point out that their usage can require manual cleanup and making sure each pixel refers to the correct palette index after applying them (seems though that this might be better covered in a tutorial about Palette Structure as it's pretty longwinding for a brief description which aims to be free of judgement).
...
Added example and fleshed out description to the existing Pillow Shading entry:
0xDB:
Added entries for Palette Effect, Palette Structure and Palette Swap.
---
Palette Effect
In Indexed Images/Modes where each pixel in the image refers to a specific color in a sequence of colors(=palette) (instead of holding the full definition of the color in each individual pixel itself), a number of visual effects such as Color Cycling and Color Fading can be achieved by manipulating the palette instead of manipulating the pixels themselves.
This was used a lot on old hardware as manipulating the definition of colors in the palette took much fewer CPU cycles than going through the image and changing the actual pixels themselves.
A simple example for a Palette Effect is just re-defining a color in the palette:
If a thousand pixels in an image referred to color at index five in the palette and index five would hold Green and index twelve would hold Red, all thousand pixels could be changed to Red by changing the color at index five from Green to Red instead of going through the image and looking for every Green pixel and changing the pixel itself to refer to index twelve.
Palette Structure
Palette Swap
0xDB:
Added History Of Pixel Art, Index Painting and Color Cycling.
History Of Pixel Art
see The History Of Pixel Art
Index Painting
Creating Pixel Art in Indexed Modes, working with Indexed Images while paying attention to Palette Structure and keeping possible Palette Effects in mind and at all times keeping control over (if necessary by fixing the results) the pixel level polish of a piece even when using tools that influence more than one pixel at a time.
Historically, "Index Painting" is the natural way to go and think about making Pixel Art as most hardware and digital image editing tools either used Indexed Modes as the default mode or simply did not provide any other modes. The term "Index Painting" was not around then because there simply was nothing else. Today the term seems to be used to set "Pixel Art"(in the sense of Index Painting) apart from other "Pixel Art"(in the sense of Digital Painting and Computer Generated Imagery(e.g. 3D renderings)) and the third kind of "Pixel Art"(the purists "one pixel at a time"- process).
Some advocate placing one pixel at a time as the only "allowed" process to create "Pixel Art"(a term which eludes definition itself) while others advocate whether something is or is not "Pixel Art" can not be defined by processes but only by looking at the results.
The actual term "Index Painting" emerged from the on-going online debate about "pixel purism", processes and results:
http://www.danfessler.com/blog/pixel-purism-process-vs-results
http://www.danfessler.com/blog/hd-index-painting-in-photoshop
Palette Swap - Color Cycling
further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_cycling
0xDB:
Updated entries for Construction and Dithering & Dither-AA (and removed version number as the board already shows when a post was last edited).
Construction
further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawing#Form_and_proportion
https://www.google.com/?q=drawing+fundamentals+construction
Dithering & Dither-AA
further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither#Digital_photography_and_image_processing
Ai:
--- Quote from: 0xDB on March 13, 2016, 08:35:29 pm ---
Construction
further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawing#Form_and_proportion
https://www.google.com/?q=drawing+fundamentals+construction
--- End quote ---
Reminds me of thumbnailing, which is sort of proto-composition, proto-construction and proto-gesture all rolled together. Which makes me think of the fact that gesture typically refers to the posture of an animate creature, but can usefully be applied to any organic object (and arguably many non-organic ones, or even the picture as a whole.).. and wonder if you are going to point out in the gesture entry that gesture is not restricted to animate things.
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