Easy PC -> Amiga IFF workflow?
 

I'm sure this has been asked countless times before but I had a bit of a search and tried something that I expected to work, that didn't. I want to make a demo but I am by no means a pixel artist. I think I could probably make a bit of a logo in photoshop though... I tried to do this with just a bit of text, one colour (though I think the JPG compression probably added lots more), exported as JPG, Loaded into Xnview and then converted to Amiga IFF. Used ADF Opus to create a blank ADF, copied my IFF to it, tried to open in DPaint 3 but nothing appeared at all after asking if I wanted to use the image format. What did I do wrong? Is there a better way to achieve what I'm going on about? Thanks in advance, from a long time lurker

I had this problem as XNView was saving it in 24bit rather than 8bit. There's a setting somewhere in it to change the output. I can't remember where. I switched to the commandline version called nconvert. It gave me much more control and supports IFF compression.

You can also get Photoshop to export a limited colour palette for you. I would not use JPG as well. It only deals with 24bit images in RGB or CMYK colour spaces. Rather use PNG. It has good support for limited colour palettes. I have not used XNview, but I use Irfanview and it supports IFF. There is a useful batch conversion utility that I use all the time to automate conversion of image sequences.

Thank you both - I'll try a combination of these tonight, much appreciated

grafX2 is a dpaint like pc program that can load/save iff (ilbm) files.
(Back in the day I used ADPro on the amiga, that’s still an option as well)

Here's a thread with a few more options: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=101095

I have never used Photoshop but atleast GIMP can save in indexed color and you can reduce colors to the amount you want with or without dithering and things like that. I have played around with converting things to the Amiga by starting out with GIMP, reducing to something like 64 colors and saving as PNG, then loading it into Grafx2 and continuing to reduce the color-depth further manually. Grafx2 can then save as IFF (lbm) and the Amiga will happily display the images.

AFAIR older Adobe Photoshot (something like 4) was equipped with IFF ILBM export plugin (quite good with HAM6 support) and perhaps there is chance to make it work somewhere else... perhaps with GIMP then it could be quite good workflow...

https://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p...4&postcount=83

^ Thats an recentish post of me showing Using Gimp to load pictures and create 8/16 color MWB IFF's, even saving the indexed colormaps for quick future use, gimp has several old and some current(ish) IFF/ILBM/Amiga plugins to load/save perfectly fine.

included snap of the plugin i use, as i recall its 1 of the older ones and people state there are newer/better, but i havent had any issues with my older one as of yet, tho i think the one i have doesnt handle Hams's even tho it says it does.

I don't know for the latest releases of Photoshop but up to CS2, the IFF plugin was available on the CD as a goodie (meaning : add it manually as it is not part of the initial setup) ;) .
Gimp also do a good job with IFF.

This is best color quantization plugin i know https://www.ximagic.com/q_index.html - can be used in Gimp. It support probably best color quantization algorithm NeuQuant and SColorQ (Spatial Color Quantization).

Btw - found both photoshop filters (AIFF8B.8BI and HAM8B.8BE) but seem they are not able to be used with Gimp... bit sad as native IFF Gimp filter seem to not work correctly.

In addition to what precedes, here are some old threads that can maybe be of interest for you :
- [cross-platform] Gimp python plugin to bring image near OCS color resolution
- Photoshop 7 optional File Formats!
- Ripping arcade sprites

ImageMagick in combination with pngquant and ppmtoilbm (from the netpbm package) produces good results as well.

This short example also takes the limited 4096 colours palette into account (posterize):
Image taken from here: https://www.egr.msu.edu/waves/people...al/kodim23.png