Palette editing, why is it neglected?
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: The Lounge
Forum Name: Resources and Support
Forum Discription: Help your fellow pixel artists out with links to good tutorials, other forums, software, fonts, etc. Bugs and support issues should go here as well.
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=10208
Printed Date: 13 September 2025 at 8:02am
Topic: Palette editing, why is it neglected?
Posted By: cadahl
Subject: Palette editing, why is it neglected?
Date Posted: 17 April 2010 at 1:51am
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What's your favorite palette editor? I've pretty much realized that no editor or paint app will satisfy ALL my needs at once, but palette editing seems in a worse state than the pixel editing itself... what I'd like to do: - Create gradients - Modify gradients all at once (HSV shifts, contrast, brightness, curves would be awesome) - Move around colors in the palette while either remapping or not remapping pixels in the image - Have 16x16 palette "bank" support (important for SNES, GBA, DS etc game development) I'm really using a mixture of applications for all this.. YY-CHR, Usenti, Pro Motion (5.1 for which I own a license, sadly not 6.x), even GIMP for moving colors around. Frustrating! |
Replies:
Posted By: greenraven
Date Posted: 18 April 2010 at 11:47am
MSPaint cuz I'm hardcore like that. 
-------------  "pwnage comes with patience, practice and planning." ~ Jalonso 
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Posted By: Hatch
Date Posted: 19 April 2010 at 8:21pm
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Can you elaborate on the palette bank support? I'll post a feature request for GrafX2 once I, you know, understand it :D EDIT: GrafX2 can do everything else on your list. ------------- |
Posted By: cadahl
Date Posted: 20 April 2010 at 4:44pm
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Originally posted by Hatch Can you elaborate on the palette bank support? I'll post a feature request for GrafX2 once I, you know, understand it :D EDIT: GrafX2 can do everything else on your list. Pixels are treated as 4bpp (values 0-15), but the palette is 256 (16x16) colors. Then, in hardware and in-game, entire sprites and individual background tiles are set up to use specific palettes (0-15). Palette 0 maps pixels to colors 0-15 Palette 1 maps pixels to colors 16-31 ...and so on. The Nintendo DS series, GBA, SNES and many other older consoles do this, since it allows easy reuse of assets AND a way to get more colors on screen at 4bpp storage cost. Think of how the bushes and clouds used the same tiles in SMB 1 for the NES (although they were 2bpp, 4 colors x 16 palettes). In fact the DS extends this scheme, and in that mode sprites and backgrounds can select among sixteen 256-color palettes for a total of 4096 usable colors. Not very widely used. But the 16x16 scheme is VERY common. :) This is how YY-CHR does it:  The GUI is confusing, but you see a scrollbar in the palette window at the bottom right. There are sixteen rows of colors and I'm currently viewing using one of the palettes (the row with hex numbers everywhere). Clicking a row will switch palette. That's pretty much the minimal support needed. |