32/64 colour generic palette

[Mathias]

As a suggestion, if there's to be official community development of a 64 color palette, it probably constitutes it's own feature, so it doesn't get lost in this thread.

And Ai has already started. Way to go, Ai. I can't really decipher whether a palette is quality by seeing it so jumbled up, so I did a real quick job organizing it a little :



I still can't really comment on it until I use it for something, but it seems useful, despite some redundant shades.


**edit This palette has no pure black or white. At this point in my pixel "career" I'm still not sure if this is a good or bad thing. Black is nice for voids, though. I tend to really value shades I can use for dark subtle detail in backgrounds, etc. In my current Meteor Boy project, I don't have this and it bugs me.

[Gil]

This is my latest 32 color one, based on Arne V20. Very early try, it needs a lot of calibrating to get anywhere near Arne's level, but that's it so far.

Comments are welcome.

[Shrike]

Good, but it needs greys!  And maybe a little less pink.

[TrevoriuS]

I see 3 shades that are by far too similar, and 1 or 2 I'd never ever use on absolute level.
Perhaps fiddle around with it to make space for greys, and then try to apply it for a bit

[Arne]

Thread split?

I had some old ones laying around, so I put them on a sheet. I had one with lots of kind of monotone ramps and it didn't cover much of the color space. Then I had a few others that I've made from my histogram stuff. Today I made a 4bit per channel (4^3=64) and it left out too many grays. Finally I just made 3 of my palettes into a single palette using PS, then I noodled on the ramps. It covers the color spectrum pretty well. I put some special colors in there like duck egg blue, skin colors, etc. Sky gradient got a lot of colors, maybe too many. I generally avoid magenta hues in sky colors, and teal-green. I haven't paid any attention to brightness based cross ramping, but I threw out some colors (seen under the final top right chunk) to get a longer plain grey ramp in.

Follow the arrows. Top right is final. Top left is some old thing I made ages ago, but it's too ramp oriented and kinda dull, and it doesn't cross ramp much.


I save the 4*16 chunk as raw and open as binary in my programs. This is a HSL cylinder I believe. I can slide the discs up and down to crop out colors. It rotates too. The ramps don't really show though (with so few colors and equally spaced neighbours). I'm not sure if the palette should spend a lot of indexes on ramps though... It's a balance between coverage versus gradients. I tried a palette with more focus on ramps and it fails to explore a lot of the color space. I'm very partial to flat looking gfx with mostly light and shadow. I don't like gradient / 'chrome' crazy games like we saw back in the Amiga days.


For reference, the 4 step generated palette with maximum coverage.


Here I tried unwrapping the colors onto a 2D plane, which is impossible of course. Basically they just try to keep their ideal RGB Pythagoras distance. It looks a bit like people pushing around in a crowd before they find their places. (The dots aren't round because the iMac is immensely slow at screencapping, it takes several frames so there's frame tearing of sorts with the dots jittering about. I shake them into place.)


Here's 256 colors. They're kind of sorted I guess. One solution could do some kind of regional bias so colors will prefer certain places based on one of their dimensions.

[Ai]

thinking of that kind of approach -- I made a very carefully optimized 256-color palette for OHRRPGCE some time ago, specifically designed to work well on a wide range of pictures, to be 'game-art'-ish, and to provide good crossramping.

so, color reducing that to 64 (with 3 different variants):

The original:


no, no plain grays. IMO they're overrated (and the hue shift on the gray ramp allows for better crossramping that produces longer, smoother ramps.)

First variant (no tweaking)



Second variant (contrast bumped up)



Third variant (auto white-balance)



If pure black and white are crucial, of course you can replace the lightest and darkest color with them.
I think all of the above are pretty good and flexible, I prefer v3 myself.

[Arne]

On your 3rd version, some of those bright colors looks a bit close, perhaps. Of course, I'm more into games with a black BG, so bright colors are a bit lost in that case, just like dark colors are lost against a bright BG.

Here's mine, same as before, I just organized the colors after hue and brightness. Need to do something about the two mid blues.

[happymonster]

Looks yummy Arne!!

Are you going to put this together with your 16 colour palette in one new thread?

[Gil]

This is less spaced out ramp-based palette I did some months ago, based on Arne's. 32 colors again.

Would this work better or worse than the other palette? I think my other one has more future.

[Lazycow]

Quite nice, but 2 of the grey's are not "clean" greys, and there are only 2 browns. (but 4x lila purple, which is probably not needed)