A guide to analyze your color palettes with Grafx2

[nobody]

Just a simple guide to use Grafx2 with some of dawnbringer's scripts to analyze your palette. I hope it helps you to create some games with better graphics in the end.


First download Grafx2, a DPaint clone, i use windows version
https://code.google.com/p/grafx2/wiki/Downloads

Then dawnbringers toolbox from here
http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/foru....asp?TID=12854

Install Grafx2, then open Grafx2 folder wherever you installed it and copy the "dawn" dir from the zip you downloaded to "\share\grafx2\scripts"

Start Grafx2 make your color choices and then right click the "brush-factory" button,


then double click DBTOOLBOX, then PALETTE, ANALYZE & OPTIMIZE, analyze, OK.

There are plenty more there to discover but this is only for palette analysis.

Some info from dawnbringer himself about what the analysis means


Would be nice to see some custom color palettes in this thread.
Just in case you want to make some ECS palettes you can right click PAL button, then reduce RGB scale to 16 (16*16*16 gives us 4096 Amiga colors).

[leathered]

Cheers for this! I was discussing the other day with someone about what the program is that people such as yourself use for this analysis. Found Dawnbringer's page but a guide is even better.

[jimmy2x2x]

Looks really useful, thanks for the heads up

[nobody]

Looks like the Rainbow Islands team was really careful of what colors they choose for the game:



Instead of Dynasty wars team. Colors are too close in hue & brightness so it results in no contrast. Look at this mess:

[Mrs Beanbag]

reminds me of Midnight Resistance, the palette on that was far too dark for some reason, i had to turn the brightness up on my monitor just to play it.

hmm i wonder how good some of my own palettes are. not very, i suspect.

[Steve T]

You can't define how good or bad a palette is by this kind of analysis... for one thing its completely out of context, its how it looks in the game which counts - there's nothing really wrong with that palette - however, I'd have done anything to avoid putting black on the horizon like that, looks very unnatural.

[Mrs Beanbag]

it's how dark it all is that makes me wonder, what i'd expect to be white is actually mid grey, it's like they've converted 9-bit colours up to 12 bit without doubling the RGB values, just leaving the top bit zero.

[nobody]

Originally Posted by Steve T

You can't define how good or bad a palette is by this kind of analysis... there's nothing really wrong with that palette.

I take it as a joke because this color palette is hideous.
How about not having colors for highlights?

PS Except if its fine to highlight dirty green with metallic yellow. :P

[nobody]

Good graphics is not only drawing but also choosing the right colors, this is an early work of Henk Nieborg.
All colors are perfectly fine in this too, plus highlights were not forgotten

[Mrs Beanbag]

yes indeed, if you choose the right colours you can give the impression of having far more colours than you really do.

if i didn't have the palette there in front of me, i might be tempted to think that Dynasty Wars had only 8 colours.

here is analysis of one of Mr Beanbag levels - actually not too bad!

edit: just noticed there are some spurious greys at the top of the palette that aren't actually present in the image, i don't know where they came from. also the sky blue is really transparent so maybe should be excluded

[nobody]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

edit: just noticed there are some spurious greys at the top of the palette that aren't actually present in the image, i don't know where they came from. also the sky blue is really transparent so maybe should be excluded

Grafx2 uses some standard greys to display menus etc, you have to take them out by left click "PAL" button, then "Zap unused" to keep only colors that exist on the image.