16 Color Palette

[buddy90]

I've been trying to do a generic 16 color palette that can be applied well in many situations, and this what I got so far...



Essentially, reds,greens, blues, and yellows, with purple as a uniform dark color. The grays were added as generic midtones. How do you think I could optimize these colors?

(Btw, the background color is one of the 16 colors)

[Mathias]

Seen the Arne generic 16 color palette thread? It turned into a community effort here in Pix. Should be of high interest to you're if trying to for an efficient 16 color palette, too.

You should now apply this pal to various 16 color images and see how it does. Even pit it against the C64 palette. Adjust the colors while applied to various images in order to get live feedback.

At quick glance here, a vital concern come to mind - the differences in luminosity between your colors don't seem gradual enough - by that I mean it looks each luminosity step has too many colors in it.
If you plotted out your colors here in a visual RGB color model, would they have an even spread or would there be clusters here and there? If you've neglected luminosity, your palette will be very painful to use when trying to shade objects, convey light and shadow.

[buddy90]

Good point. Another attempt, taking luminosity into account.

[Lizzrd]

If you desaturate that third color a bit, you can scrap the gray and have another color.

[tehwexxl0rz]

Probably not a good idea to lose that yellow.... Lots of things are yellow.

Both of your greens are fairly bright. Maybe you could lower the luminosity of the lower one to expand your mid-range?

[TrevoriuS]

I just tried using the palette and immediately I began to get the feeling as if you didn't use the palette at all so far and I'm definately not impressed by the way it's setup. Alot of colours have similar luminosity and some very common colour ramps  simply can't be achieved.

While making this tree I found important colours missing, things not combining.

At 1: the gray doesn't mix with the green and yellow as it is equally luminescant, why isn't the yellow brighter than the green. Hue blending from gray/blue or even purple through green resulting in yellow is much more common than a ramp that uses a bright green at its end or a ramp that uses yellow as its center colour. The colours at 2 are all the same when put next to eachother. They can't be combined as neither stands out across the other.

Then at 3 you have a dark brown that is between 2 blues, I don't want to use that brown unless it's lighter. Taking the brown at the top right of the colours I arranged around 3 and desaturating that, then desaturating the blue directly below slightly would make up soemthing much more useful. Then the grey needs to be fit into that with a different luminousity.

Now I adjusted the colours to fit my tree but most of all keep making stuff with the palatte, make it pretty by adjusting the colours and then see if you can change the colours on all images simultanously while retaining their beauty. It may be that some images will go out to use different indexes of the palette but as long as with some colour swapping they'll retain their readability and prettyness your palette is improving. Draw alot, make use of it alot. That's what makes it a 'generic' palette.

[kriss]

I'm not a pro, but shouldn't we decide wich model to draw first, before to create palette ?

[buddy90]

Alright, this time, I'm going to start with a greyscale, with a steady but sure climb of luminosity. To hopefully prevent redundant colors.



This is another attempt.



Here are some images that were given this palette treatment. Obviously, I didn't pixel it over with these colors, I just imported it into GraphicsGale, which is why it may look a bit odd. The mock-ups are from other artists, and original pieces are linked here...

http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/36919.htm#
http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/53873.htm
http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/52968.htm#
http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/18864.htm#




Not quite there yet.

[TrevoriuS]

I adjusted brightness and contrast in some of the originals before applying a nearest colour algorithm with a couple of changes that might even make the palette work somewhat better, although some of the changes you made are quite good. Just do not get deceived with luminousity. If you change the saturation or hue the luminousity is subject to change, this is because 100% red and 100% blue are just as saturated as magenta (2 colours on 100%), so just changing the hue would make the colour twice as bright. I think this may have led to some mistakes, mostly in these extremely light values. The top 4 I would all replace with either the yellow or the white, and I'd prefer the yellow to be a little darker to stand out of the white. With this in mind I started playing with the palette; without painting myself however. Here's the result for you to learn:

[Organ_House]

These new colors really kicked the old palette into high gear

[buddy90]

Wow, thanks Trevorius! Those browns and yellow really added a kick to the palette. I think now, the palette is bit more balanced with warm and cool colors. Also, theres a good red, blue, green, and yellow, which really are powerful colors. I changed your light cyan to a more purple color.

Here are 2 more mods, very similar, just 2 colors are different in these.



We're definitely getting progress here. But we're still not quite there yet.

[buddy90]

Ok, I think I've got this to the point where i want it for now, at least. I'm going to upload it to the pixeljoint context. Thanks again for the help guys! It certainly helped me.

[Organ_House]

Good luck (wo)man!

[PypeBros]

the lack of a sky colour is still a boulder in the path, imho.

[buddy90]

Yeah, I think you're right. I replaced the light purple with the cyan.



I still have a couple of days before the contest ends, so I guess I shouldn't rush it.

[Mathias]

Looking much more balanced now.

Do you think it's reasonable to say that one palette may not adequately adjust to all of these mockups at the same time? People create custom palette's for their projects for a reason - it's best suited to the subject matter at hand.

I'm not trying to say you're doing anything wrong, just making the point that you shouldn't expect perfection but rather a compromise so all mockups here look good, but none great, perhaps.

I assume a guy would want to always make custom adjustments to a palette used for a specific project. If everyone starting using the same palette for their little indy games they'd all look too similar.


Your work creating a base generic palette is highly valuable, because it offers a nice starting point for anyone in need of a custom palette. How does it stack up against Arne's? Just use his same palette-test image to see.

[buddy90]

Hm, you make a good point. The bottom 2 mock-ups seem to work much better with these sorts of palettes as opposed to the top two. I shall look for a more appropiate image test later.

Upon looking at Arne's palette and comparing it to mine, they are some similarities. Mainly, we share similar the 4 midtone red/blue/green/yellow colors. His has alot more greys and I have alot more browns in mine, though. Let's compare side-by-side.

Arne on top, mine on bottom.

[ptoing]

It looks like you are automatically reducing these mockups to the respective palettes with something like Photoshop or whatever.

This does by far not get the optimal possible result as an automatic colour reduction/conversion on images with low colour count will almost always yield worse results than manual reduction.

Just quickly did this with arne's palette


It is not optimal and ideally when converting from on system and/or palette to another there should be choices made to make stuff more readable (which I did not) like black outlines around the walkable background elements or simplifying the background. Just wanted to show that arne's and probably your palette too are capable of more than your reductions would suggest.