You can either have a platform with preset colors or a defined bitspace.

F.ex the 12bit (3*4) Amiga OCS with 4096 possible colors is converted to 24bit not by 256/16 but by 255/15 (=17), as there are 15 steps other after zero, 17*0=0...17*15 = 255.

I'm not sure what you mean about 256 colors and 6 shades. Granted the largest full colorspace possible with 256 (sucky) colors are 6*6*6. But usually you would be able to assign any color to those 256. As with Amiga AGA that has 256 colors that can be picked from a full 24bit palette.

Edited by DawnBringer - 11 October 2012 at 12:10am

Judging from your replies, I can see that most platforms seem to allow you to build whatever palette you wish.

I tried a simple experiment on a cellphone some time ago (which is the reason for this thread). Using J2ME code, I displayed a picture, and put some text on top of it. I definitely didn't use more than 32 colors in total. Yet, the picture I displayed didn't look like it was supposed to look.
I concluded it was because the cellphone was limited in number of colors, and that the colors it did have to offer, could be calculated somehow.

Let's say that cellphone could display 4096 colors. That gives us 16 shades of each channel. 16 reds * 16 greens * 16 blue.
That means, if I want to use the 3 darkest possible red shades, I'm stuck with these: #100000, #200000 and #300000
So if I try to use e.g. #140000, the cellphone will automatically change it into #100000.

That's my theory of what was going on. So I thought, maybe graphics artists know about this, and maybe they build their palette for their art from these color-tables for that reason, to make sure their art will display properly on all kinds of devices? But it looks like the answer is a no.

When I look at pixelart at pixeljoint.com frontpage, and aritsts put "13 colors" or "33 colors", I can't help but to think "mkay, but from what color-table?". I'm probably just being silly.


Then it is true of course, that some devices have a preset color-table. The C64 for example. The Amstrad CPC too (although technically the CPC can be categorized as having 3 shades of each channel available).
But as far as I understand, when a device is said to have e.g. 256 colors available - that does not mean you can pick whatever 256 colors you wish. Instead it means you have 256 colors from a color-table to choose your palette from. Is that completely wrong?
If it is true, then logically that color table must be a simple 6-shades-of-each-channel table, right?

When you pick your palette for your art, do you just pick them from "the air", or do you ever use color-tables of some sort?

Yes, we pick from a colortable...the one of all the 16.7 million colors that exists ;)

Think you just need to wrap your head around the concept of palette design. A 16 color palette.

Now, if you aim to use a static, full 256 color palette...the easiest thing would be to create a big collage of the kind of art, pictures & colors you want...then let a program (like Photoshop) color-reduce it to 256 indexed colors (ex. Save for Web / PNG-8).

Picture to show the color-tables I'm thinking about.
http://www.dewfall.dk/colors.png

If you were to pick your palette from the 216-colortable, would you say that would limit your pixel art? Would it make you feel "handicapped", or do you believe you could create just as cool pixelart as if you could pick your palette from the 4096-colortable or even 16.7 million colortable?

Not planning anything. Just chattin'. Trying to learn more about this.

I was curious to find out whether graphics artists, especially pixel artists, picked their colors from certain color-tables in order to make sure their graphics was displayed correctly everywhere.
I thought that might be a part of the retro-ness in making pixel art. But it seems not. I guess there's no big need to do so. (It seems to be necessary for the cellphones pre-Android though).

The palette example you linked to is a good one. Looks awesome.
I can remap that to the websafe colortable, and me (not being an artist) would be quite happy with the result. Not that I can't see a difference. It just wouldn't bug me the slightest. I am however fairly sure the artist (you) would think "What? That's not what I made!"
So I thought maybe you'd run into situations like that before, and therefor you'd know about certain colortables you could use in order to be "safe", but it seems not.  It's apparently either not a situation that occurs much, or else graphics artists are just fine with it.

But I do sometimes think it would be awesome to have a site like IndieGameMusic.com, except it should be for graphics. And then it would probably be beneficial if there were certain palettes / colortables game-developers could input in their search, to get better chances of the graphics from different artists would match somehow.

IndieGameGraphics.com - would like to see a site like that. Could be awesome. Often thought about starting up that project myself, but first of all I'm way too busy, and 2nd I think it should be done by a graphics artists for best results.

It would require graphics artists to agree on certain palettes / colortables though. I think that 16-color table link you gave me, is an example of one such palette to be used for all sorts of games. It could be given a name by the author, e.g. DawnBringer16a or sumthin', and then used by other pixel artists. (And I find it awesome when graphics like that can be achieved using only 16 colors. That's what pixelgraphics is about in my opinion).

But depending on what platform the game-developer is targeting, there will sometimes be colors the platform can't display. So the device itself will auto-remap the colors to the closest color it CAN display, and then we're back to the "What? That's not what I made!" thought.
In J2ME there's a actually a function that returns the colorcode for the color the device displays, for the simple reason that you can't count on different J2ME devices displaying the same color, despite using the exact same graphics file.

Anyway, it seems that this is maybe only a problem with J2ME devices, which I do find a little bit difficult to believe though. I'm wondering if the Nintendo DS (knowing how great Nintendo is at creating limited devices that can do stunning things) doesn't have similar limited colortable, and likewise with the Gamepark and families.