Pal 1.0 Palette Helper Software
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=9655
Printed Date: 23 February 2026 at 7:45pm
Topic: Pal 1.0 Palette Helper Software
Posted By: evincarofautumn
Subject: Pal 1.0 Palette Helper Software
Date Posted: 03 January 2010 at 7:51pm
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So I was working on some pixel art a while back, and ended up getting pretty frustrated with the palette. From this frustration, a weekend's worth of coding, and a zealous desire to get something done for once, came a handy little applet to help me choose better colours. I named it Pal. Give Pal a curve through an HSV colour cylinder, and it gives you a nice smooth palette from that curve. Plain and simple. Export it as a bitmap in one of several sizes and start pixeling, or save the curve for later tweaking. The palette is more of a guideline than a finished product, but it's a very good start, and, I think, a good teaching tool. It's not perfect, but, then again, no software ever is. Consider this more a request for comments, critique, and suggestions than an actual release. You can visit the http://cias.rit.edu/%7Ejwp3365/ - home page for more information on what it is and how to use it, or go for the gusto and just download http://cias.rit.edu/%7Ejwp3365/pal/1/0/Pal-1.0-win.zip - version 1.0 for Windows. Happy pixeling, and a belated happy new year! |
Replies:
Posted By: Hatch
Date Posted: 04 January 2010 at 10:10am
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Neat! Cheers for getting something done; I have a hard time with that D:
Since you regard it as valuable as a teaching tool, would you consider releasing the source code? Nothing could be more informative, plus it could be ported lickety split! ------------- |
Posted By: evincarofautumn
Date Posted: 04 January 2010 at 12:37pm
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Thanks! Starting things can be easy, but getting them done sure can be hard. As for the source code, just look at the home page: "Best of all, Pal is free as in freedom and free as in beer: you can use the program and the palettes it generates for whatever purposes you like, and once I get around to cleaning up the source code a little, those interested will be able to download it and abuse it to their hearts' content." So what did you think? Do you have any suggestions for improvement? Would you recommend it to others? Should I bother continuing to develop it? I'm trying to drum up some hype here. Tell your friends, enemies, neighbours, and random people on the street! :D Anyway, when it comes to porting, there's only one non-cross-platform thing in there: the calls to the system load and save dialogs. Everything else is done with SDL, which works on just about everything these days. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find an easy way to port to the Mac, because of how picky Apple is about their toolkits. Ugh. If anybody has any pointers on that issue, I'd be glad to hear them. |
Posted By: Hatch
Date Posted: 04 January 2010 at 1:13pm
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D'oh! I'm sorry for not reading your website even semi-thoroughly. I didn't see a source download and immediately jumped to a conclusion. Glad to hear you're planning to release it.
I'm at work, on a Mac, so I haven't been able to do anything with it yet. I'll test it under Wine when I get home and let you know! Just off the top of my head: • Maybe use a cross-platform widget library for the save dialog, like http://docs.wxwidgets.org/stable/wx_wxfiledialog.html - WxWidgets . It hurts portability for obscure platforms, but it's obviously better than native Windows system calls. • Support for exporting palette files for the apps that support them, like GrafX2, ProMotion, GraphicsGale, Photoshop, probably others. No clue if they all use the same format or what. ------------- |
Posted By: evincarofautumn
Date Posted: 04 January 2010 at 1:36pm
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Hah, no problem. I look forward to hearing your thoughts later on. WxWidgets could be a good idea. I haven't used it, being more of a GTK+ user. I hear SDL and GTK+ play well together, so I can use the GTK+ dialogs. I can't believe I didn't think to support palette files! I know Photoshop's ACT and Microsoft's PAL, and as far as I know these are both pretty common. I intend to support other image formats (esp. PNG and GIF) and allow a curve to be computed from a source image. |
Posted By: Hatch
Date Posted: 04 January 2010 at 1:57pm
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GTK+ is great for GNU/Linux and Windows, but horrid for OS X. It doesn't work natively; you have to install X11 and run it as an application, then run the GTK+ app from within it. Might not sound too bad, but trust me, it feels awful and kludgy. Not to mention the fact that, for many Mac users, the "Macness" of their apps is very important. I fear you'd be alienating a (small, admittedly) chunk of your potential user base by using GTK+. That's why I suggested Wx; it gives you a painless wrapper for the prickly Apple API while also covering the other major platforms at no extra charge.
EDIT: OK, got a chance to play around with it a bit. It's good fun! Personally, I find splines much easier and more intuitive than bezier curves. An option to choose between the two would be wonderful. Also, maybe you could have the legend for the controls built into the main interface somehow, perhaps in a disclosable area to the side (it's already quite tall). Oh, and I can't dig up a reference for you at the moment, but most UI experts (Bruce Tognazzini and I think Jakob Nielsen) advise using text rather than pictographs on buttons to eliminate ambiguity. ------------- |
Posted By: evincarofautumn
Date Posted: 04 January 2010 at 8:03pm
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Thanks for the tips. Peculiar, though, since I often use the GIMP on OSX, and I don't think I've ever had to launch the X11 server separately. I'll look into Wx, anyway. What do you mean by "splines"? You were a bit vague on that point. Pal does use Bezier splines. You might be thinking of Catmull-Rom splines, a special case of cubic Hermite splines, which have the friendly property that they pass through all of their control points. I stand by my decision to use Bezier splines, anyway, because most digital artists have at least a passing familiarity with them, from working with vector illustration software such as Inkscape. That's not to say that I won't include other interpolation types in the future. All bets are on at this point. And I know I was a bad little programmer and didn't follow conventional UI design practices when it came to the buttons. Text for me means translations, translations mean text rendering, and I was quite simply too lazy to link with SDL_ttf in addition to plain old SDL. Long story short, that one was gonna get fixed anyway. Also, your suggestion of a collapsible panel for help has given me some deliciously evil ideas for a slick modular interface. Trying not to get ahead of myself on that one. The trouble is that I know how to pull it off in GTK+, but with your recommendation against it...you see my point. You've been so helpful! Now if only there were like four or five more of you.  |
Posted By: Hatch
Date Posted: 04 January 2010 at 9:47pm
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http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/glossary/l/blspline.htm - This is what I was talking about when I said splines. You lost me amid cubic-catmule-hermaphrodite such and such. Let's just say math is not my strong suit. Wikipedia also has an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spline_%28mathematics%29 - article on them that makes me a little drowsy. Anyhoo, in design circles I hear it as splines vs. bezier. As I suspected, this is a massive simplification so as to avoid causing the frolicking artistes to furrow their brows.
As for GTK on OS X, that was my experience a year or so ago. After poking around a bit, I found http://gtk-osx.sourceforge.net/ - this , so I guess the situation has changed. ------------- |