help with this palette

[x-death]

hello everyone, i'm starting work on some images but because i'm making a piece that is cartoony/retro with sprites and a background. i wanted to have a decent palette to begin with because that is what destroys my attempts at this everytime i try. so i wanted to egt one first off.

now i've been working hard at this palette, and his is as close as i've gooten to decent. and its crap and i wanted to know if anyone could fix it up for me?


also now that tocky has posted a good palette down on reply #6. i would appreiectae if people would help teach me how to use it.

[tocky]

yours on the left. I think the main problem with this pallete is that the contrast is pretty low, try to get it so that the difference between any two colours is immediately obvious. retro palletes are not generally big on subtlety, but then I guess it would depend what you want.

[x-death]

thanks that looks really good. so how much consrast beteen that mid tone would a highlight need? because i dought it would go all the way to white.

[tocky]

I'm not totally sure what you mean. Broadly speaking: I think you want to break your colours up into sets and have it easy to discern what set a given colour is from. (here, you want your backgrounds distinct from your foregrounds, and the light/shadow version of each colour distinct, so that your shadows actually do the job of adding depth to your objects.) But you'd also want, for instance, your yellows to visibly be yellow, and visibly distinct from your greens and oranges. So long as you can tell them apart with ease, that's enough contrast - but you also want them to be attractive colours.

[x-death]

yeah that is what i want. just want to be able to have light/shadows to my sprites. so i can add depth to them. and i wasn't sure if i wanted them to be visible different colors but i figured it would be best to have it that way anyway. and yes i wamt to visibly see the background from the tiles and characters and stuff i make.

[crab2selout.png]

some very valuable information about low colour palettes in the following links
http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/index.php?topic=1618.0
http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/index.php?topic=4306.0

Check out the factoids about the 64 palette ptoing posted in hte first link. See how the colours stack together to provide multiple value ramps? It's not just enough to have a light blue and a dark blue and call it done. Those blues need to have a relationship to your other colours or you aren't going to get much use out of this palette.

[tocky]

I've been mapping old palettes today.


The most common set up for hardware palettes is just to map out a rgb colourspace with as much precision is required/available. You decide how many shades of red, green and blue you'll allow for, and then you get all the colours you can make with combining those shades. The spectrum uses two shades each of red green and blue (off and on, basically) the CPC uses three, EGA uses four.

When actually drawing stuff, you pick a smaller subset from the master pallete that best suits the subject. For 8-bit systems there's generally some heavy restriction for how much data you can draw on the screen, so you get different screen modes.

The CPC is pretty typical, and especially pretty, so I'll use it for example:
mode 0: 160 by 200 (low-res, wide pixels, 16 colours)




mode 1: 320 by 200 (regular pixels, 4 colours)



mode 2: 640 by 200 (high res, tall pixels, 2 colours - haven't found examples of this, but you get the idea)

Because we live in the future, you get to make it up a bit, but knowing how this stuff is constructed makes it easier to imitate. I'd recommend just commandeering one of these palettes, and culling the colours you don't need.

[x-death]

crab2selout:
thanks for the links but i don't completely understand how they used there colors to achive such perfection...i get the general idea but hasn't completely registered in my head.

tocky:
those are sensational! but my only question is how do i use them so i can clearly show the background from the stuff like character and ground sprite? as i'm making platfomrm screenshot mockups.

[tocky]

I feel like I'm kind of flooding you with vaguely related information, you gotta post what you've drawn if you want more specific criticism.

There are all kind of ways to do contrast, like using warm colours (reds, oranges, yellows) against cool colours (greens, blues, purples) or using saturated colours against grayer ones, or varying the level of detail. In the real world, stuff is usually bluer, duller and less detailed if seen from a distance.


from arne's drawing tutorial: http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/art_tut.htm

All of this stuff is useful in game art, but you can see how it works, for example, in the splash screens for cpc games above - the warm and cool colours, desaturation, value, edge direction. It takes a while to pick this stuff up. Platformers aren't any different, it's just kind of harder because stuff has to tile. Post what you've got, though, you'll get better help.

[crab2selout.png]

That robocop is awesome. I assume it's jsut a colour reduced scan, but the widepixels and low-colour palette really give the scan a life of its own.

x-death. I think hte main points me and tocky are trying to put across are to make sure your palette has easily distinguishable colours(your first post's palette looked a bit grey overall) and try to structure your colours so that light versions of say your red for example, can work as highlights for some of your other colours. In that c64 factoid picture Ptoing posted in the thread I linked to, can you see how the c64 colours are arranged like a dark to light gradient?

You said the main reason you were making a palette is because you struggle with choosing good colours, right? Have you tried using Arne's palette(the second link and look on the 2nd last page). It should give you some ideas