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DS development > Palette handling - now with added Photoshop Script

#152940 - luggage - Sun Mar 23, 2008 2:10 am

Hello

I've been tinkering with DS development and using PAlib but one thing that's puzzling me is how do you all handle the 256 colour palettes. I'm trying to keep to one good 256 colour palette but using Photoshop is causing me issues.

I create my sprites then convert the colours down but I obviously end up with different palettes. What's the best practice for this? I've tried saving off a generic 256 colour palette and bringing that it but it's not great. I've also tried keeping one image with all my frames on and reducing that to 256 colours which is better but then I have to keep saving out all the frames each time in case the palette has changed.

Any suggestions? I guess it's ok if you do all your artwork pixel by pixel and hand create a palette to match everything but I'm not that much of an artist.

Thanks!

Last edited by luggage on Sun Mar 23, 2008 6:47 pm; edited 1 time in total

#152958 - mattlacey - Sun Mar 23, 2008 11:48 am

The easiest way is to up the bit depth to 24/32/whatever, paste all your images into one image, then drop back to 256 colours.

Then you should be able to copy them back out to their separate ones and use the palette it's created.

Or something like that.

#152964 - TwentySeven - Sun Mar 23, 2008 1:40 pm

Your best bet is investing some time into your toolchain.

Perhaps cobbling something together to copy your sub regions/tile/sprites off of your larger sprite sheet..

#152973 - M3d10n - Sun Mar 23, 2008 4:14 pm

I'm pretty sure I saw a command-line for converting images that could batch convert multiple images to 256 colors and also generate a common palette for them all.

But I can't remember the name no matter what... maybe it was GIT? Did you try looking at ImageMagick? It's very good for doing this kind of tool.

#152978 - tepples - Sun Mar 23, 2008 5:40 pm

Another thing you can do is stick to 16-color images. You can have 16 different palettes on each screen that way, even without resorting to extended palettes.
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#152982 - luggage - Sun Mar 23, 2008 6:47 pm