Feature 05 - Generic 16 color palette

[Arne]

I've been working on a general purpose 16 color palette. I got some nice feedback on IRC, and I'm at version 11 currently.

The main philosophy is to (if possible) have:

-Pleasant common colors, like sky blue, vegetation, skin tones, etc.
-Cold-Warm ramps
-Cross color ramps (Red-Orange-Yellow etc.)

I had to sacrifice full white, but I think it's working. Full white is kind of obnoxious and dull temperature-wise.

The red is a bit dark, but I've found it to be useful that way. It can be worked up in value by using some of the lighter colors.

The most recent change is the dark brown. I needed a dark color for background stuff, but brown seem to be a good choice since it can ramp with a lot of colors (green, yellow, red, purple).

I'm doing a few mockups to see how it works in practice. Samus and her friend is ported from my mini Metroid project (which is 32 colors). The platform mockup is kind of uninspired.


Jet Set Willy II Speccy screen PO. I need to play that game some. The Speccy version seems superior, otherwise I often prefer C64 versions of old games.

[Helm]

Yeah Ptoing showed me the version before this one on msn and I was thinking 'perhaps he shouldn't have pure grays' but then again my c64 instincts stopped me, when I considered how absolutely useful pure grays are there to bridge other hues.

However if you went that way with the dark brown, just give a subtle tint to the second darkest gray too perhaps.

I am not lamenting the loss of pure white too much.

Otherwise this palette is excellent and very adaptable. Good job. I might use it for something or another.

[Arne]

I'll have to sleep on it. I think with such few colors, there'll always be something which irks me. The two darks are a bit problematic yes. Maybe they should be in reverse order.

Noodling around.


Quick and dirty reversed darks.


Edit: ref: http://www.mobygames.com/game/zx-spectrum/jet-set-willy-ii-the-final-frontier/screenshots/gameShotId,132010/

I'm leaning towards reversing now maybe... With a brighter dark warm I can do more stuff with the earth colors, and a cold extra dark does feel less intrusive.

[Helm]

I'd say yes, cooler darks are better in this case, especially since night-time blue-to-black is such a prevailent theme in 8-bit games. The coppery warm brown won't be as useful.

[Conzeit]

hmm interesting.The most similar to this I've tried is messing with GBC pallete...it IS really challenging to make a pallete that works on games with completly diferent uses of contrast.
I'll show u my archive of GBC screens, maybe you can use that to test urs..in HALFS! because they're just 8 color screens XD...who knows.


Maybe u should grab a bunch of c64 screenshots instead

hrm, I think you're limiting yourself trying to keep pure skin tones there. best illustration artists always say there are no skin tones, it's all about how you surround them.

boy, I'm really missing some purples in there. You'd be amazed at how much of an ambigous bastard purple is :p. the only other neutral color in WARM vs COLD is green, and it's not nearly as easy to use for bridging...in my experience.

I'm not really sure but...I think you should atleast try putting a purple in there sneaked as a skintone.

Sorry, might be self important to post this, but eh...I dont know, it's a fast take on what I'd do for a generic 16 color pallete...maybe it can give u some..ideas?



hehe, I sure like my purples dont I? C_____C

[ptoing]

Eww wtf camus, really. Those GB ones are horrible. If there are only 4 colours for bg and 4 for sprites you can not make an global palette with colours like that and think it will work. I have to say I find those combinations rather pukey. I would rather just go with 2 different colourramps for the bg and fg. both quite greyish, sprites a bit warmer than bg, and only slight tint and not hugely different colours.

[Conzeit]

well, I'm not saying go and copy everything I did...it's just a suggestion, if you work your own pallete with your own mockshots you tend to do what you think the pallete should do, and well...I think the whole point is to make the pallete more versatile. I thought maybe some screenshot from various gb games would be of use.

I happen to like the crazy combination of colors when I play on GBC...for whatever reason...the point was to give him screens from various games with various senses of contrast, I'm not saying hey look at my awesome colors, I'm just giving him those screenshots in case they can be of use. who knows.

[Arne]

Thanks for the replies.

I think the reason blue would work better as a far BG color in general is because the sky is blue, and the sky is always far away, so it's hardwired into us. The question remains just how brown to make the darker grey now... Should I go for a ramp with the earth colors (brownish) or a ramp with the grey?

As for skin tones, my guess is that there'll be 2 common environments. Black background and Sky blue background. I tailored the skin purple for the sky background as there'll be cool ambiance. Black can be considered neutral. With just 16 colors I'd rather cover the most average situations first, meaning warm light, cool shadows. The character will also move between so many environments that an average skin color would be result. My palette is based on the C64 one by the way.

I made this 3d cube histogram based on a few hundred thumbnails. Some time ago I made a 64 color palette based on it. You can see the popular colors stretching along the grey from corner to corner. The white highlight is the histogram and the color pixels are any color with a hit. Only 256 colors out of 16777216 are grey. Of course with games you'd have to push the saturation a bit to make the elements read clearly.
http://www.greatgamesexperiment.com/slideshow/user/arne/6812/6

[Sherman Gill]

Ah, did not know you had an account here Prometheus  .

Anyways, here's something made using the pallete. Well, version 7 of the pallete. Was too lazy to update it to a newer version.

[Arne]

A c64 pal comparison. My green is the same, and the blue was just changed a tad.




I noticed I have some of the palette histogram project pics online, so here they are. I had to compress pretty hard to save bandwidth/space.

256 source pics, I just googled various things, took the decent pics and scaled down with nearest neighbour. (fullsize is 1024)


Here's a HSV cylinder plot, 16 slices (meaning I had to compress the plot to 16 values). Distance from the center is saturation.. I think I plotted random colors to make the color part, i.e. the colors you see are the RGB 3D Cube existing in a HSV cylinder dimension! You can see the histogram being rather diagonal.

If you wonder why the high value (white) tip is skew, it's because some hues are darker. Yellow kind of goes off like a wedge there cuz it's brighter.


1/4th of my source was pron... because 1/4th of the internet is. Lots of skin tones here...


RGB cube. I plotted /4 here to make 64 pixel squares, but here I scaled down further. It's just to give you an idea what the cube is about.


Finally, my 16 color palette. I faded the spectrum and added the histogram as reference. Hard jpg compression, sorry.
As you can see I dare venture out a bit outside the safe/popular colors just to get some range. If I were to pick the most popular colors only, I'd end up with 16 greys. Again note that is is /4 to make a 64 pix cube so there has been some compression.


C64 palette. Note thatthe black and white are in the corners.


I once tried to make a 64 color palette based on this data, but I never arrived at anything conclusive.

[Arne]

The same HSV cylinder as above. Rearranged it shows the shape of the RGB spectrum and histogram better.

Angle=Hue
Radius=Saturation
Height=Value (brightness)

The value is calculated with:
Value = (0.299 * Red) + (0.587 * Green) + (0.114 * Blue)

(That's why the shape is skewing/twisting from blue to red to yellow inside the cylinder.)

[Helm]

Hah, I can't say the hard tech was something I had considered when I was thinking about a global 16 color palette. Neither did the people that hardcoded the c64 one, but they seem to have made a very decent one. Anyway, as to the open question of 'how brown should the gray be?' well, grays are usually context-sensitive, so they appear warm against cold colors and cold against warm colors (with perhaps a slight bias towards coldness because they certainly appear cold against BLACK and WHITE) so I would say 'a bit more brown than you'd think would be considered enough'.

[Malor]

A c64 pal comparison. My green is the same, and the blue was just changed a tad.



1/4th of my source was pron... because 1/4th of the internet is. Lots of skin tones here...

hmmmm I actually saw some things in the source..gathering? That looked like porn ...anyways, I don't understand your fancy tables..and color wheels..but the palette loks great!

[Arne]

it's worth to not that my histogram thingamajib merely is an.. what's it called... empirical study. If you needed a general palette for photos and stuff, then it might be a guide. Game graphics often benefit from being clear and easy to read, meaning more saturated cartoony colors. I think I made a thumbnail batch source image from classical and contemporary art and video game graphics as well, but it has disappeared.


Here's what photoshop made of my source image. It prefers to grey colors a bit to get better averages, so I made a few versions from a more saturated version of the source image as well. Then purples appeared for the first time.


(edit: oops,  it seems like Selective and Adaptive produced the same result... (also, no forced colors here))

Maybe one approach is to make 8 greys with subtle hues for bridging (Bitmap Brothers used this didn't they?), then 8 saturated colors. I'll try this approach and see what happens.

[ptoing]

Hm, I never really understood the Perceptive, Adaptive, Selective stuff in PS, like how does it work?

About the Bitmap Brothers thing. Dan Malone did stuff kinda like that. Also Amiga is 12 bit, 4 bit per channel. So when he wanted monochromish pictures done in more than 16 colours (with 4bpc you only ever get 16 pure colours of any shade) he chose colours which are kinda close and interleaved them.

Like so



Mark Coleman, the other artist BMB employed has a massive fetish for supershiney stuff and Orange/Blue complimentary contrast. All the gfx he made for BMB games are either Orange and Blue or Orange and Grey for most of the part. Many people say, ah yeah, Bitmap Brothers style, and kinda throw it all in one bag, but looking closer Dan Malone's and Mark Coleman's stuff are VERY different. I prefer Dan's pixelstuff much over Mark's

[Arne]

Guessing: I think Perceptive picks colors which we can see and differentiate between, whilst Selective would just selects colors based on popularity or something. Adaptive I don't know.


One problem with 16 colors is that a majority of the colors will be allocated to covering the basic ones (RGB,CMY,BW). not much room for the warm-cool gray ramps if you also want Brown and Skin tone in there.


I made a few more experiments:

[Arne]

I think I managed to solve the cold warm dilemma. I took the dark green (which was relatively unused and rather dull as far as ramping goes) and made it a complimentary to the other dark I had (aside from the darkest cold). Now I can dither those to get a dark grey-ish color if I need one.

So:
- Really Dark Cold for vague non-interfering background details on black.
- Dark Cyan which works with the green and blues or as a cold dark gray, and as a dark background tree line color too I suppose (dark green with a blue-grey atmospheric tone).
- Dark Brown which works with the red-browns. Can, along with the colr above, provide interesting temperature variations in the darks.

Most colors can build on those. I might still nudge them around some more, but the theory is sound I think.
I also did some minor changes to other colors. I need to do more mockups to see if I'm really on to something here though.

[ptoing]

This is very solid i would say. I will give something a shot a bit later.

[Conzeit]

HOLY vuck! you are PROM?1???!!1? C_-

now I feel like a total moron for my skintones reply >______<

WOW, sorry for the mandatory asss kissing but I love that tutorial you made on painting, your Megaman redesigns (SPECIALLY Clashgal =D~~~) and I am forever thankful to you for hooking me up with EXILE......(I cant exactly emulate it properly tho =/ )

I am VERY glad to have you here =D
________________________________________________________________
Ok, now with the ass kissing out of the way...
Sorry, couldnt help myself again 

[Xion]

Conceit: Ew?

Nice palette, Arne. Here's a pic I made using the old one:


Then I converted it to the new palette:


Not sure which I like better.

[ptoing]

Hahaha, I wanted to make a similar comment about Conceit's palette, too purple, odd greens and worse contrast.

Quite nice Xion, clouds are fudgy tho with the dark outlines, looks odd in terms from where they should be lit. Could be developed more


Something to look at and reflect a bit

[Conzeit]

hey, fuck you guys purple rules 

and...about the contrast, when u saw when u said that didnt have a real black for some stupid reason.

[Helm]

Yeah I think the newest one would serve most purposes. When it's finalized I'll make a mockup or two using it to see how it holds up. Though I would really suggest you minmax the values a bit more to get couples in grayscale much like the c64 palette does. It's a very useful effect.

edit:

Grandpa yus says:



can't expect anything pure-green to jump to the bright yellow on the highlight. Need a buffer.

[LoTekK]

Helm, doesn't prom's latest pallete have 3 greens?

This is a pretty interesting discussion, especially with the more technical stuff in the middle. Putzing around with the current pallete to see what I can come up with for a sprite/mockup.

[Xion]

Helm, doesn't prom's latest pallete have 3 greens?

Two are too dark and there is no hilight.

[LoTekK]

Two are too dark and there is no hilight.

Yeah, I was just noticing that while playing around with it. The middle green is a little too close in value to the darkest; bumping up the value by a few notches seems to work ok. As for the highlight, I tried messing with it a bit, and H58 S40 V90 seems to work nicely. It still works as a highlight for the yellows, and while arguably a tad bright against the green, it can work in moderation.

[Conzeit]

*ahem* hence my pallete......

[Arne]

Yeah, it occurred to me, but I was worried about leaving the dark green-cyan behind too much. I'm really not a fan of too bright green, especially not the bright mint green like in the C64 palette. That's the first color I scrapped.

I'm also unsure about the red being so dark, but I kind of like it.

Still v13. Most of the useful colors with a clear identity are mid value, so that's where I wanted to concentrate. There's a bit of a hard edge there at the green, orange, grey though...
(I think Ptoing got the order slightly wrong btw)


There's obviously always going to missing colors, so I really need to do more empirical studies to see whats a good compromise. I need to do more mockups still.

Edit: Thanks for the mockups and feedback!

[ptoing]

Hm, promotion and photoshop handle value differently. And the values on the c64 one that promo produces are right (fact)
Adjust > Desaturate in PS is fucking useless to make something grayscale, kills the contrast.

I have to agree with Helm about the green.

[Arne]

What I can do is (and have do on the new version I'm working on) is to bring up the dark cyan along with the green. This to avoid them separating too much. This also makes the grey work better with the dark cyan. If you look now, they're a bit too far apart as well.

But I really have to be adamant about not lighting up the dark cyan too much. I want it to work with the really dark blue as a background color which does not interfere with the foreground values.

I should probably stop discussing Epistemology in PMs and actually get some mockups done

Btw, How do I get JetSet Willy to stop jumping in his bed in the RetroSpec java emu?

[Helm]

If you look at the tree you have in the mario mockup it's pretty clear I am not the only one running in problems with not enough greens. It's not so much the darker green that is too dark - though a version before that was better too - it's that there's no highlight color before it leads to yellow. I could, I guess, deal with green and yellow highlight but if you consider 22% of all game art is forest green (Epistemological fact  ) you're not achieving what you set out to do with good colors for game environments.

EDIT: another thing: don't worry about colors for fullscreen demoscene stuff because we will all dither and get the tones we need. If it can be done with the c64 palette, it can be done with your palette and probably better. It's the prime colors for game art sprites and tiles where dithering everything just might not work and will create unpleasant texture you should be optimising about.

[Conzeit]

well, what I did most certainly goes against what Arne wants with the dark cyan, hell I even went and removed the entire gray ramp :p. I've never used one...it's probably because of how all art I've done is game art...and I never DID get into Helm's whole c64 craze.

all I really thought of was making long ramps of any color, and...well I've always thought dark shades were the best place to reduce saturation a little and have all the ramps blend...so I did C.c

and so, Conceit continued to talk as if anyone cared

[Helm]

and I never DID get into Helm's whole c64 craze.

I resent that blah blah I never intended any craze, I just found a really good palette and worked on it blah blah not my fault people make bandwagons out of anything blah blah


I actually very rarely use pure grays too, but I can see the point of having them in an all-inclusive palette since they act like magic colors, linking different hues.

[ptoing]

Also do not blame Helm alone, I have my part in it as well, more like a joint effort. But indeed, not our fault

And agree on the greys, as soon as you tint a gray it loses some of it's neutral linking capabilities as it will have a bias towards some colour more than another.

Might as well post this again. Look at the ramps with the grays, you could not do that as effective with tinted grays.

[Arne]

I do agree about the green, it needs to be more nature-ish. it's an important color, since it's grass color. I think grass is more common than trees.

I could hue shift it to yellow, that would bring the value up, and link it more with the warmer brights I have... but I'm afraid that'll destroy the color identity of the green.

Really lousy forest test:

[Lee N]

Green is not only an important colour because it's used alot, but also because humans see green better than any other colour, and will be able to tell banding alot easier - even with a high colour count. A 16bit distribution of RGB565 is not uncommon simply because green is so much more important than the other two components.

Feel free to put me in the "more greens" camp

[Helm]

actually, how about this?

[LoTekK]

After playing around a bit with the palettes, I'm beginning to understand Prom's hard-on for that dark cyan. Helm, yours seems to be a good deal higher key than Prom's, and the dark low-sat purple feels rather warm for a universal shadow, especially against black. Also, your greens do an odd shift from warm light, cool mid, but slightly warmer dark, which feels a bit jarring, imho. I'm playing with a slightly modified version of Prom's, with a very slightly lighter and warmer mid-green, and a less-saturated yellow, and so far it's working out nicely for a darkish forest scene unabashedly similar to Prom's example. The only color in all the palettes so far that I'm not too sure about is that garish orange.

[Helm]

if another dark color is needed after my dark purple (though I don't think so), I'd prefer to unify one yellow and the brightest flesh shade (towards the flesh shade mostly) rather than lose one of the greens. dark forests could be done with the mark 13 palette anyway. It's the not so dark forests that are troublesome.

[LoTekK]

I'd probably tend to agree with you about the unification of the light yellow and flesh. I did actually forget to mention in my previous post that the higher-key palette you provided might be a better "universal" one than prom's, in that it would likely cater better to not-so-dark environments.

[Helm]

same experimentation, my variation.

[Conzeit]

whoa dont get all touchy on me now helm  I meant that more as a regret, like I missed my chance. The whole fad was a good thing, it made people  aware that it was posible to build ramps in more than one way FAR more than my ever-repeating preaching on "hue-shifting" ever did.

Ha, Ptoing is such a good sport, I soooo should've said "ptoing's c64 craze" instead 

hrm, I thought one dark warm shade and one dark cold shade would be enough, but I am starting to see how that is a problem O_o

[Arne]

Thanks for the crits!

Here's an experiment.

I merged Yellow with Skin as suggested. I want it to work with explosions (which are common) but maybe it's a bit too yellow though. But Yellow is used for both Lego heads and Smileys, so maybe it's possible to get away with it. Real skin color is more towards pink-gray of course. However, maybe I can offset the yellowness with the skin shadow color which is purple.

I lightened the skin shadow color a bit to bring it closer to the skintone yellow, and take it away from the red so it can work as a higher value for that.

Light sky blue (cyan) was greyed a bit. it's more realistic as far as skies goes, and less obnoxious to look at. Doesn't work aswell as a plasma/energy color now though.

I lightened brown, and maybe the dark brown as well.

I did stuff with greens cuz I now had a new color cuz of the skin-yellow merge. I'm a bit disgruntled by the fact that I don't have a good mid tone green now. If I want a pure green object, ZX Spectrum style, I only have a light green and a dark green. The eye is indeed more sensitive around the greens. I think, to avoid banding, one can use dithering with advantage, since plants tend to be gritty. The sky on the other hand is more sensitive, so deliberate banding or decorative clouds will have to be used. I recall Ptoing did a mockup with cloud mountains which worked rather well.

I kept my darling darks.

I pretty much stole Helm's tree.

[Helm]

Ha, Ptoing is such a good sport

Yes, he's very efficient. You should see him work the ovens with a smile 

Arne:

I am happy with this. I don't see anything potentially breaking at a first glance. The yellow skin color is fine for a SPRITE... we'll have to check it out for a bigger portrait or something, but I suspect what with the grays and purple shadows and stuff it'll be okay. Barring a few test runs in different mockups, I'm ready to give the difinite thumbs up.

Will mockup later tonight.

edit: I really don't think anyone will ever need a skin tone they cannot find, as the way I see it, all of the 'yellows' ramp can substitute, dither, and enhance the two 'main' skin tones.

[tomas]

Really nice palette you got there. I had to do something with it so I whipped up this quick mockup. Crits are very welcome.



EDIT: I opened a new thread for this in case someone wants to c&c to stop this thread from potentially being cluttered with irrelevant posts.

[LoTekK]

Potentially stupid question: we've got 16 colors including black, correct? What happened to transparency?

tomas, that looks nice so far, but seems rather unfinished, notably the cliff edge, dirt, the tree (highlighting on right side is too uniform, needs to be broken up a bit, and the foliage needs the silhouette broken up a tad, imo).

[Lee N]

Potentially stupid question: we've got 16 colors including black, correct? What happened to transparency?

Transparency can be any of the available colours. On a system where you are allowed to use 4 colours per sprite and tile, the 4th colour is used to define transparency leaving 3 colours to paint with.

[Helm]

Potentially stupid question: we've got 16 colors including black, correct? What happened to transparency?

This is a global palette, not the palette of a single sprite. Any sprite that uses some of the colors of it can reserve one (one that obviously it will not use on the sprite itself) and set it in code to transparent, if one were to program something using it.


edit: vanquished

[Rosse]

Potentially stupid question: we've got 16 colors including black, correct? What happened to transparency?

Because tranparency isn't a color technically. You have to know that a picture with a palette is just a "bit-map", you have for each x and y coordinate a value from your palette. And transparency means one specific value which isn't drawn from the computer.

[Helm]

We need more people to explain this.

[Lee N]

We need more people to explain this.

Well, no one can ever say that people on pixelation aren't helpful.. need an explanation? here are five! 

[LoTekK]

Ah ha! I understand the concept of a key color that will be used as the transparent color, having used this in different contexts, both 2D and 3D, but I had always been under the impression that if sharing a palette among different assets, the key color/palette position would also be shared. Thanks for clearing that up.

[ptoing]

Also you do not even need to use a colour for the transparency, meaning you can use all 16 colours on a sprite.
You could just make 1bit maskimages which correspond to what is transparent and what not in a game.
Afaik they did stuff like this a lot on older systems without hardwaresprites

[LoTekK]

Ah, right, I completely forgot about alpha masking. Doh.

[Arne]

Utopia, which I ripped gfx from just the other day, used a mask of some sort (5bp+a mask). Here's a screen, using the RetroSpec Ripper:



(I made a duplicate palette (index 32-63) so I could see the stuff correctly in 6bp mode, but in the end I had to write my own ripper cuz I needed to rip using some header variables for image heights)


As for my 16 color palette project, I'm just treating it as an optimization problem. I will use it for my handtop which I will travel back in time to launch. It has my 16 color palette, 4bp per sprite + 1bp opacity mask, or something like that. Not necessarily a speccy but I made the mockup today so it'll have to suffice as an illustration.

[LoTekK]

That handtop mockup is awesome. I'd hit it!

Thanks for that breakdown diagram, btw, as well as that entire page of sprites. Should serve as some nice reference.

[Lee N]

I will use it for my handtop which I will travel back in time to launch.

Is that before or after you have travelled to the future to launch your time machine? Wait.. time travel is confusing.    

Seriously though, sweet handtop.

[Arne]

Is that before or after you have travelled to the future to launch your time machine? Wait.. time travel is confusing.   

I did it before after before before after before... I think.


My palette was a bit dark and gray, so I took the bull by the horns and curved the mid and brights up a ton.
new v16 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------old  v15

[Helm]

The near-white gray is so near-white, might as well make it white. Why not?

[LoTekK]

Hmm, Jonlan... Laser Squad?
I think the higher key seems to be working (which also nixes my earlier comment about Helm's palette), at least after looking at the images on a DS screen, which has a fairly narrow viewing angle beyond which the colors get a bit washed out.

[Arne]

The near-white gray is so near-white, might as well make it white. Why not?

I'm not sure if I would like that. I find Pure White a bit obnoxious. It's also rather uncommon to see in images unless there's serious overexposure going on.

It's 242,240,231 now, so it does have a warm tone to it. 240 is quite different from 255 I think. A slight yellow white will appear brighter than a pure white without having that cold sting, but mine is a bit more grey.



Jonlan is from LaserSquad, but the water tank and master droid is from RebelStar Raiders. I felt an urge yesterday to repixel the entire moonbase.

[Helm]

for art a pure white is not very useful unless certain lighting conditions are met. But for gameart is an invaluable tool of separation. In small pixel spaces, sometimes you really need that sharpness to make a single-pixel specular add life to an edge.

[Arne]

I can see it working for single pixels, when you need the white to bleed.


Trying out the white. Changed dark blue to less saturated. Lightened the two paired darks. Noodled on the water tank. 50% dithering is an interesting effect I need ot explore more to separate surfaces etc..

[PASSOUT]

16 colors!!!!!? I mean realy,how do you draw that?Thats...INSANE!By the way,I love the pallet not realy a purple in there,but still I'm going to use this every time I sprite.

[Feron]

I love how this is coming along.  One thing i thought is that you could merge the sky blue with the grey and lose none of the readability, of course greys are useful, but merging them would free up a space for perhaps a darker grey.

I don't know how much photoshop vucked the colors when i saved it, but you get the idea:

[Arne]

Hmm.. I don't know, it's nice to have a neutral, a colored grey feels a bit sick. I'd also like to keep the light blue close to a good sky color which connects with the darker one, and by keeping it somewhat cyan it works as a plasma color as well. Good idea though, if I absolutely must have a new color I might do something with the greys. It would be cool to have a darker one. Right now I sometimes use the light blue and grey together for various specular effects. If the grey was a bit darker, I could probably use the light blue as an intermediate between the grey and white.


I did another mockup (still wip). Took me a while to figure out that the thing was a Victorinox knife, and I even have one in my belt all the time. I made a little scythed walker of it. The barrel was not very interesting so I scrapped it.

[Helm]

So are we now keeping the pure white?

[Arachne]

Neat. I've been wanting to make a 16 color palette of my own, but I didn't quite know where to begin, so this is really helpful.

I played around with it a bit and probably ended up with something too dark because of the black background. I'll see what happens when (or if ) I manage to put together a decent mockup.



Here with your latest version:

[Helm]

Welcome back Arachne! Nice art, really crisp, if not a bit over-AAed. I think this palette is awesome.

[Feron]

So are we now keeping the pure white?

i would hope so.  1 pure white pixel always seems to look bigger than its surroundings pixels, which is very useful for eyes and possibly even teeth.  If you sprite has about 16 pixels for its entire face one white pixel next to a dark makes a perfect eye only using up 2 pixels.  It never really seems the same with a grey-white.

EDIT:  as a side not, could this thread please be featured, its a great thread for learning color theory aswell as lots of participation from the community.  Plus it would be nice for the final product to have a place in the feature chest for all to see and use.

[Arachne]

Thanks, Helm Yeah, I tend to go a little crazy with it once I get started.

This is what I'm using now. More contrast

[Arne]

I think that kicked the darks back to far.


So far I don't have a problem with the full white.

[Helm]

in spriting stuff this palette is a bit tricksy I found. The darker shades tend to group, not even out so they can be used as buffers. The blue and the desat blue mix well as dithering, but again don't provide a small ramp against each other.

[Ai]

The latest update has a L (of L*a*b*) ramp very close to linear, which speaks pretty well of it.
Comparing it with Arachne's version, it's much more evenly distributed; Arachne's has pairs of colors of very similar intensity.. which does boost contrast overall, but I believe for a palette this size you can't afford to spend slots on colors that just look muddy when mixed.

Helm, the latest palette doesn't have that problem as severely; you can get some depth from it. (although the other grey's gone -- but IMO that improved your sprite's look.)

[Helm]

I am using the latest palette. plant 2 (from darkest) and the sole water color mix muddy exactly how you describe (check the shoulderpad on my sprite) and are too close to each other. They should be ramped, one of the two being brightest so they can serve a function against each other besides a very subtle tint which isn't very useful for game art.



edits on the blue ramp mostly. Check the values.

[EyeCraft]

I just wanted to say this topic is totally bitchin'. I'm very intrigued with the whole process, and that latest edit by helm looks even more versatile 

[Arachne]

I tried to do something about that blue, too. Just changed the hue. I do like things dark, so I suppose it's less useful as a generic palette in that respect.



Helm's edit to the right:



Edit: There's a chance I might have my monitor calibrated too dark, now that I think about it.

[Feron]

I tried to do something about that blue, too. Just changed the hue. I do like things dark, so I suppose it's less useful as a generic palette in that respect.

whilst the blue works very well fo that mockup, I can't see it working very well overall.  There just not enough contrast in that blue ramp.

Helm's edit makes a good few suggestions.  this is very close to its final product i can sense.

PS.  Will this thread please get featured and a little banner up the top there??

[Helm]

When it's done.

[Squirrelsquid]

this palette is so awesome! I recreated my shoot em up with it.

[Arachne]

I ended up doing what Helm did (topmost ramp), but I wanted to keep my purple.


I have yet to brighten those dark shades. I think my next project needs to be Sunny Sunflower's journey to the Sun

[Arne]

Sweet mockups!

Hmm yeah, a purple tint could be interesting (to provide some better hue coverage). How about 90,85,180 for the dark blue? Should it be lighter maybe? Less saturated or more?



I noticed the little nudge helm did on the dark cyan-grey. If darker, it works better for subtle BG 'highlights', while also ramping better with the dark blue. However, I think it also shouldn't wander too far away from the grey, so I'm kinda split on that issue.

However, I did pull the grey down a bit in value, but mainly to make it less similar in value to the light sky, and bring it a bit closer to the dark cyan to improve the grey ramp overall.

[Feron]

i'm not feeling that purple water im afraid.  whilst a purple hue would be nice, how many things in nature are actually purple; obergines, rare plants, grapes?

[Helm]

how many things in nature are actually purple; obergines, rare plants, grapes?

A morose and languid feeling of dispondency.

[Arne]

Actually, I'm not a huge fan of purple either. I'd probably go the other way on that dark blue, namely: 0,100,140 - a whimpy blue-green-grey. (probably too whimpy for sprite stuff.)

[Conzeit]

strange, both helm and feron have purple in their avatars.

what's going on people it's PURPLE we're talking about here!  I feel it is the dark green tone the one that isnt that useful...

[ptoing]

strange, both helm and feron have purple in their avatars.

Durr, smart boy, Helms is originally made from the CGA palette 1 which has that icky purple and he just changed the grey to yellow.
And Ferons has purple I believe because purple works quite well to create an otherworldly atmosphere.

And I think that dark green is ace.

[Helm]

THE SECRET PURPLE

[Cow]

For what it's worth, I think the greens are awesome. Maybe you could merge the two middle tones on the yellows ramp to make room for a purple? ...or am I missing something?

Great palette so far, very fun to work with.

[Feron]

A morose and languid feeling of dispondency.

For a non-native english speaker, your vocabularly astounds me.  I'm going to show my ignorance and ask what those words mean, not even google could help me!

strange, both helm and feron have purple in their avatars.

Indeed, we do.  However neither mine nor helm's avatars are game-mockups or sprites, which i believe this pallette is primarily for?

Maybe you could merge the two middle tones on the yellows ramp to make room for a purple?

Whilst looking at them side by side, the do seem a little similar, however i think merging them would definitely set this back a stage.  the darker is used as a buffer, as going from orange/yellow to brown would be a very harsh transition.  For some reason i find blues can go from dark colors to light without a buffer and pull it off, but it always seems a bit uglier with yellows.

[EyeCraft]

For a non-native english speaker, your vocabularly astounds me.  I'm going to show my ignorance and ask what those words mean, not even google could help me!

Try www.dictionary.com. It's one of my fav websites.

[Arne]

Typing dict equilibrist in the url bar in firefox will send you to some dictionary. I'm sure it's possible to customize these kind of features.

Here's a version with another blue (0,100,140). This mockup is an actual game I've coded and gotten into a working state twice (in early-mid nineties and then in 2001), so I might finish it this time around too. I kinda feature-creeped it now, but it should still be doable.



One idea with the Orange and Pink is that they should both work as shadows for the Skin tone Yellow (to alter the perception of it). However, are they too similar? Should they ramp with each other or be the same value but with differing hue&sat? Should the Orange be just a tad brighter to bring it further from the Brown?

[Cow]

Whilst looking at them side by side, the do seem a little similar, however i think merging them would definitely set this back a stage.  the darker is used as a buffer, as going from orange/yellow to brown would be a very harsh transition.  For some reason i find blues can go from dark colors to light without a buffer and pull it off, but it always seems a bit uglier with yellows.

Good point, yeah. (though on Arne's mockups the colors are rarely used in conjunction, and they look pretty rad I must say)

Should the Orange be just a tad brighter to bring it further from the Brown?

I think that would help. Could maybe use the orange to ease into the pink, then.

[robotacon]

Excellent thread.
It's interesting to see how different people reason about using different colors.

Based on what I've seen here, this is what I've come up with.



EDIT:
And this is what GraphicsGale did to your current test image Arne:



I stepped back from using the 100% white again because I think it's too bright and I picked up a skin tone that replaces the bright yellow.

[happymonster]

Since this thread is so useful, and very interesting, I thought I would post here rather than start a new topic.

I love the palette, but feel that it could do with a few tweaks. Here is one the versions of Arne's palettes (not sure which one now, I think v16, but with less purple in the dark blue):




My new version is below...

I think the red, blue, green and 2 dark grey/blue colours are excellent. As with what Feron said, I think the lightest blue is a little redundant. So, I've sacrificied that colour and added in a 3rd green. Although close to one of the dark blue/greys it does help take some of the greys out of the greens in the trees. Since green is so common and the colour range we are most sensitive to, I thought it was important to add a 3rd green. We still have the 2 dark colours to use and dither with the green as well. In fact we can dither the green with the dark blue to get a darker blue-green as well. The addition of a 3rd green adds a warmer colour to the mix to use as well.

I also added more contrast between the 2 medium brown/oranges as I felt they were a little too closer together.

Finally I have changed the dark grey brown into a dark purple brown. I think this helps adds a dark warm colour in contrast to the dark cold blue colours and also helps add a purplish colour to the palette. This helps remove some of the grey/blue with the images and can be used as a darker skin/flame colour (notice I've used it in the explosions). I think the addition of 2 dark but warm colours helps compliment things against the dark blue/greys and gives more options to the artist.

So, I ran the pics through promotions remap and then did some editing. I think the changes help add a little bit more dynamism to the colours. Here is the new image:

Arne's palette (HappyMonster variation #1)

[Arne]

Interesting. I'll take a look at the palette again, maybe bringing it up to V20:

My monitor was a little bright earlier, when I re-calibrated everything I had done looked a bit bright and grey, including the 16 color palette.

Earlier I could not see darker than 20/255. Now I can see 10 at least, and 5 very very barely if I look a long while in black BG fullscreen mode. I have a CRT.
http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/upload/features/05_arne/value.gif

Recalib comparison. I pulled down the darks, and consequently increasing their saturation a notch. Hard to see at first, but look at the saturation in the red for example.


I think this is with the new calib.
http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/upload/features/05_arne/jsw_touchup.gif

The old calibration palette has too bright BG colors I think. I wanted those to be non-interfering. They looked dark with my old calibration, but now I think they're too bright. It's a bit of a personal preference perhaps. I like black backgrounds in games, and it's nice to be able to detail it to bring atmosphere into the game (without destroying the readability which black BGs do so well).


re: the bright blue... I could just pull it down a bit... Sky gradients could be useful, and it's nice to have the option for a bright version of the sky. Wasn't SMB 1 pretty bright?


Edit:
I don't have much time to work on this now, so here's v20 without much changes, I just applied my most recent calibration curve to it (slightly lighter than the curve above). Didn't touch the light blue. I think it's maybe too far from the blue, but it should also work to ramp between the mid grey and white perhaps? I think I didn't use max saturation for the light blue since I wanted it to be a viable sky color, and not a plasma-neon color. Also, a less saturated variant of it ramps better with the mid grey.

[happymonster]

The dark greys look ok to me, but I have a LCD monitor which has more difficulty with colours than a CRT. 
It's a pity pink is used so rarely (but importantly), it could let us fit in a more used colour..

EDIT: With regard to the red, I like the blueness aspect of the original, it makes it more interesting to me than normal reds.

Please don't feel you have to change anything in your palette if you don't want to.. it was mainly for my personal curiosity and use.

[Rosse]

Ptoing's pic of all possible c64 50% dither shades inspired me to make these (Arne's Palette V20):





The smaller version is reduced with photoshop (50% size, bilinear) and greyed out in promotion (since photoshop uses other formula to grey out colors). Maybe it's useful for somebody.

[happymonster]

Rosse: That's handy! Is there a way to group the final dither by HSL as well?

Arne: With the light blue/grey that's 5 blue greys in total, when there are only 2 greens and 2 red/pinks. I'd just prefer to have it a bit more balanced, but I suppose everyone will have their say on the logic behind their own colour choices though! 

[happymonster]

Ok. After another test I think it's safe to remove the pink and use the bright orange instead. For small sprites it's very similar. Ironically enough, those two dark grey-blues get in the way a bit if I try to add a darker blue, and the purple/brown does the same if I try to add a darker red. I don't think we need any more grey's, greens or oranges, and I'm not sure if a darker blue is needed. Because of that, and the tendency for the colours to shift in saturation and hue as they darken I thought it best to add a mid-range violet-indigo colour which can be used on it's own, with the dark blue or the grey-blue's or purple-brown. This could be used for sea, sky and other more moody lighting and dark pieces. Since the palette was missing purples and violets previously, I think this helps fill out the colour range a bit more now.

(HappyMonster v2)

[HMC]

Ehhh, I'm not so sure about that. This is foremost supposed to be a versatile palette, but it feels like you're adding in purple just for the sake of having purple.

[happymonster]

I understood that the aim of these 16 colours was to provide a common palette useful for many different pieces of art. As such surely putting a purple in there is making it more versatile? There were no purples or violets in there at all previously (wuith the exception of a bright pink) which is more of a limited color selection to chose from.

You are right that I haven't really used the purple yet in test artwork, but that's because I'm not much of an artist.. :p

Again, this doesn't have to be adopted, it's more for my own use.

[Arne]

I was ripping some speccy gfx and tried to 'fix' the palette. The halfbrights were pretty boring and pointless so... well, actually this is exatly how the V20 16col. pal. started out...


Re: Purple, it's... not my favourite color. It's not very common, but... I can totally see how it's usable from a graphic design perspective when you need range and separation of elements. For certain games that's a good thing since it helps readability. I'd rather throw a skintone in than having that purple. And then I'd... eventually end up with my 16 palette I've/We've been working on here.

With my V20 palette, I guess you could get a few grey-ish purples by using dithering (and bleeding) if you absolutely must have them.

[happymonster]

For the speccy, I think a foreground and background colour chosen from 16 colours would have worked better. But really, it had no real custom chips and was very basic and simple (but cheap). It still worked as a computer, so I don't think we can really complain. There is always another feature we would have liked classic computers to have, and now with super PC's we are still not satisfied!

[Jad]

I was ripping some speccy gfx and tried to 'fix' the palette. The halfbrights were pretty boring and pointless so... well, actually this is exatly how the V20 16col. pal. started out...


Re: Purple, it's... not my favourite color. It's not very common, but... I can totally see how it's usable from a graphic design perspective when you need range and separation of elements. For certain games that's a good thing since it helps readability. I'd rather throw a skintone in than having that purple. And then I'd... eventually end up with my 16 palette I've/We've been working on here.

With my V20 palette, I guess you could get a few grey-ish purples by using dithering (and bleeding) if you absolutely must have them.

How will you ever make slimy aliens without purple, man!? >

Okay, so humans may be more widespread than aliens in videogaming and visual entertainment but still! >

[happymonster]

Do slimy aliens have to be purple?

On-topic: 16 colours is pretty limiting, but I think for a generic palette there should be some purple / violet in there.

[Jad]

Actually, I only see the need for a darker purpl:ish color, like the darker skin color Arne has there.

Combine it with blue and skin and you get something that you can trick the eye into believing is purple.

The lighter magenta:ish, though, I can see no use for either.

Except as hair colour on my fictional character Neon, but the name suggests that his colours aren't the most well-used either

[happymonster]

Well, I made the darkest brown in my version more purplish as I agree with you. Not sure about the mid-range purple, but it does seem to help break up the grey/brown/blue colours of the original!

I guess it really does depend on what gfx the colours are being used for.

[Seele07]

Hello,

on page 2 of this thread, there was a color ramp and a greyscale version of it - now is my question:
how do i make such a greyscale version out of the VGA16colourpalette?
the reason why i want to have that, is, that i want to know how to use the VGA16colour-map/-palette to design some pixelart like the good old ones did (yeah, it will be hard for me, but i'll try) . I dunno really how to explain that in english... you can use, lets say, a bright yellow, a bright blue and a white as shades of grey, if you like, and that is what i want to do with the VGA16colorpalette 

Greetings,
Ingo