PAL-M Filter Tricks

[Leandro Jardim]

Ahhh! I am finally getting reasonable results with the PAL-M filter of WinUAE. Its great, it works well with images of any type, but with the copper rainbows that I use, unfortunately, dont look very good.

But I discovered some tricks, to enhance my images. You will see that the tips are very logical, but takes a while to discover.

The main trick is to use the PAL-M filter color controls only to match the same image quality of a determined CRT-TV, that is, to get a "base" image on which you will work later.

After you get this image, you must use the color controls on the WinUAE display panel to adjust the final colors of the image. Dont use the PAL-M filter controls to adjust the image color for correcting bad gradients because this way they will look even worse.

This happens because the controls of PAL-M filter works only with colors on a 16-bit range, while the controls on the WinUAE display panel works with all the colors of the screen.

So, when you adjust colors using the WinUAE display panel, you get the same gradient levels that you had before, only with a different intensity! If you do it the other way, the PAL-M filter will do all the work of precalculate the colors again and the gradients will be represented badly. Argh!

Some controls of the filter are very handy in some situations. A negative contrast can be used to soften the colors gradients of the image, for example. A negative gamma can be used to get much more hot colors, too. And at a lower level it helps to decrease the contrast also.