AuthorTopic: Questions about GrafX2  (Read 2707 times)

Offline cels

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Questions about GrafX2

on: May 18, 2014, 08:09:09 am
- How do you identify and replace superfluous colours in GrafX2?  Like if you have 150 colours, and you're pretty sure you only need half of that, because half of those colours make up less than 1% of the pixels on the screen and are probably sloppy leftovers from various palette changes. Do you press the 'PAL' button and just go through every one of them, changing the values to see where they're used and then replacing the superfluous colours one by one?

- How do you work on tiles using GrafX2? Is there any way to divide different tiles into linked entities? So if I make a Super Mario game and I want to change the texture on the green pipes, then changing one pipe in the picture would change all the pipes on the picture, is what I mean. Obviously, changing the palette would impact everything in the picture, but I'm talking about pixel placement. Or do you simply create different tiles and then constantly repaint the picture when you make changes to the tile-set?
« Last Edit: May 18, 2014, 08:35:26 am by cels »

Offline yrizoud

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Re: Questions about GrafX2

Reply #1 on: May 19, 2014, 12:54:49 am
- You can force a reduction and see if the result is good. Undo and Redo to compare before/after.
- The histogram can let you identify immediately the colors which have a very small usage
- You can sort the palette, and it's very likely that near-duplicates will be next to each other. Then you select the series of color to unify, hit "merge" (which gives them all the same average color), then "reduce to - unique".

- About tiles, there's the Tilemap mode which will repeat what you do on all instances of the same tile. See here : http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=15310.msg140299#msg140299

Offline DawnBringer

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Re: Questions about GrafX2

Reply #2 on: May 19, 2014, 03:38:22 pm
If you install my Toolbox of Lua-scripts there are several options dedicated to palette reduction/optimization, f.ex.

* Palette-->Analyze & Optimize-->Median Cut
Classic and effective reduction to a desired # of colors.

* Palette-->Analyze & Optimize-->Optimize Colors
A script that identifies clusters in colorspace (redundantly similar colors) and fuses them. Adjustable strength/radius. Great for weeding out all those accidental near duplicates.

* Image-->Optimize & Remap-->Reduce (rare) cols
Processes both the image and palette to remove the least useful colors. Can reduce to a desired amount of colors (set "Removal Tolerance" to 100% and select how many colors to remove). A very effective algorithm.

Offline cels

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Re: Questions about GrafX2

Reply #3 on: May 19, 2014, 09:52:07 pm
Thanks so much, both of you!