AuthorTopic: Color Pallets Technical Question  (Read 3734 times)

Offline uridicy

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Color Pallets Technical Question

on: July 11, 2008, 07:13:53 pm
    I have a technical question for some of the pixel artists out there that deal with limited color pallets.  I have a bunch of 16 color character images that I created in photoshop.  Now I'm trying to save them as 4bit bmps, but I need the color pallets to be identical when I convert the images (because of the way our compression works with our programming environment - this is for my work) - including the order of the colors in each pallet.  I've tried using graphics gale, but it re-arranges the colors in the pallet, so I have the same colors, but I don't have them in the right order. I'm not using photoshop CS2 for the conversion because it forces black and white and that means I'm losing 2 colors for each frame.

   Is there a program with a batch convert that will keep the color pallet exactly the same when I convert from 8bit to 4bit bmp?
Thanks! 

Offline ptoing

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Re: Color Pallets Technical Question

Reply #1 on: July 11, 2008, 07:59:29 pm
I am pretty sure you can turn off forced colours in photoshop when you index stuff.
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline uridicy

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Re: Color Pallets Technical Question

Reply #2 on: July 11, 2008, 08:10:04 pm
Do you know how to do that?  My lead artist didn't know how to get rid of the forced colors. The only way we got the 4bit option to even come up was to first index the image with black and white and then do save as bmp.
« Last Edit: July 11, 2008, 08:33:19 pm by uridicy »

Offline ptoing

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Re: Color Pallets Technical Question

Reply #3 on: July 11, 2008, 09:00:40 pm
Just checked and seems that PS is really shit at this. I would suggest getting some proper program to make pixelart, such as ProMotion.
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline uridicy

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Re: Color Pallets Technical Question

Reply #4 on: July 11, 2008, 09:06:36 pm
Yeah I tried promotion, but it didn't look like it had any batch conversions and I have hundreds of files to convert.  I don't have a lot of exp with promotion, but that's what it looked like at first glance.

Offline ptoing

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Re: Color Pallets Technical Question

Reply #5 on: July 11, 2008, 09:10:27 pm
Yeh, PM sadly has no batch conversions. I am sure there are programs that can do stuff like this in batch tho. Maybe stuff like Irfan View or ACDSee.
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline Arachne

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Re: Color Pallets Technical Question

Reply #6 on: July 11, 2008, 10:25:35 pm
How about saving the files as 4-bit GIF instead and then converting them to BMP in Irfanview or something? That worked just fine for me, but I'm using Photoshop 6, so I'm not sure how helpful that is. :P I also tried to convert from 8-bit BMP to 4-bit BMP in Irfanview, but then it screwed up the palette. :(