Disclaimer

• If it doesn't work, tough.
• If it trashes anything, well, that's a good lesson in taking backups.

Background

Then my computer was stolen.

I went through every disc I could think of, but could never find that palette editor again. Eventually I got Photodesk, which can do simple palette editing with blends, but it just wasn't enough - the display wasn't right, there weren't enough controls and so on. So, I decided to write my own.

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Use

Mouse operations on the colour window
Mouse operation	In plain English	Action
Select:	left mouse, single click	nothing (but see Adjust)
Menu:	middle mouse button	bring up standard menu - basically allows you to do a quick palette save
Adjust:	right mouse button	start a selection; click Select to end
Double-click:	left mouse button click twice quickly	edit colour (using colour picker)
Drag:	left mouse button held down and pointer moved around	one of three operations depending on options in Tools window (copy current colour to destination, or swap the two colours, or merge the first into the second)

All that will become clear if you read on... (I hope!)

Mouse operations on the iconbar icon
Mouse operation	Action
Select:	open colour window
Menu:	bring up menu
Adjust:	open tools window

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Tools

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Selection tools

• Blend
  this is probably the most useful tool - you create one colour, create a second a little way away, and use this tool to smoothly interpolate between the two. For instance, creating black at the start of the colours, then white at the end, and blending between the two gives a full 256 greyscale palette. For coloured palettes, try creating black at the start, white at the end, and then a colour half-way down - for example, red. Blend between black and the colour, and then white and the colour - you've got a red-tinted palette. Try dropping it onto a 256 greyscale image and see the difference. You can extend this by creating a second and maybe even a third colour, and blending black-colour1-colour2-colour3-white and creating some complex, moody palettes to enhance greyscale images.
• Invert
  This makes the currently selected colours turn into negative versions of themselves - for instance, black becomes white, red becomes cyan, blue becomes orange, green becomes purple and so on. You can of course apply the inversion a second time and the colours return to their original values. See also Reverse.
• Reverse
  This simply flips the colours around - so a fade from blue to red becomes a fade from red to blue. It might be handy if you've just inverted the colours as well, as an inversion also makes dark colours light and light colours dark.
• Lighten
  This adds a little brightness to each colour in the blend; it does tend to wash the colours out a little, so simply applying "darken" will not restore the colours to their original values. It's useful to either just lighten a picture up a little, or used heavily to create an "over-exposed" effect (perhaps used sequencially this can be used to create a simple fade-out animation?). See also Darken.
• Darken
  Essentially the same as Lighten, but making the selected colours darker. Also useful for creating dark, moody pictures.

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Whole palette tools

• Mirror
  and
• Flip
  These two options basically do the same thing - flip the palette over so the colours at one side move to the other side. Mirror does this from left to right, and Flip does it from top to bottom. Flipping the palette is not the same as reversing it; consider a greyscale palette, with black in colour 0 and white in colour 255; a proper inversion/reverse of this will put black in 255 and white in 0. A flip, on the other hand, has black in 240 and white in 15.

• Clockwise
  and
• Anticlockwise
  These two tools rotate the palette around by 90 degrees - either in a clockwise direction or anti-clockwise (I hate the Americanism counter- clockwise ;). Two rotations in one direction is the same as a reversal.

• Move left
  and
• Move right
  This moves the palette left or right by one space; this is useful for lightening or darkening a palette without washing the colours out, simply by bumping them up the order a little. Because the operation is done with wrap-around - that is, if the colour is pushed off one end of the palette (e.g. left of 0) it appears at the other end (e.g. now becomes 255) - you might have to edit the top or bottom lines of colour to create a properly flowing image. Or use it over and over for a colour cycling effect! See also the Shift operations.

• Shift up
• Shift down
• Shift left
  and
• Shift right
  This moves the palette by a whole column or row; shifting up or down is like using the Move functions 16 times; I don't know why you'd want to shift left or right, but included them for completeness ;)

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Dragging

Swap exchanges the first and second colours, useful if you want to change one colour but preserve the colours in the destination slot. For instance, if you're creating a sequence of 16 colour strips of colour for a game, you might want to simply have the reds before the blues, but you still need the blues so you swap them over.

Merge allows you to build new colours - for instance, if you have a colour and drag black into it, the colour becomes darker; drag some red into it and it becomes a little more red and so on. It means you can create colours from existing colours in a slightly different way to the colour picker - you can generally only add red, green and blue or cyan, magenta, yellow and black from the colour picker, whereas this allows you to add a tint of any other colour.

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Channels

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16-colour palette import

Full blend is the best blending to convert a 16 colour palette to 256 colours - it takes every colour in the 16 colour palette and assigns them to every seventeenth colour in the 256 colour palette, blending between them as it goes. So, if you have a 16 colour palette theat goes from black to blue to white, you'll have the same effect in 256 colours.

Left hand wrap drops the 16 colours into the 16 colours on the left of the 256 colour palette, and then blends to the colour in the next left hand slot; this is a more accurate blend than "Full", but if you have a traditional dark to light 16 colour palette the last line will probaly be white fading quickly to black, which looks odd. However, this wrap-around may be desirable for other effects, such as colour cycling. Row and Column basically just drop the 16 colour palette into the 16 colours of the row or column you drop it on to; for instance, drop a raindow palette with Column import switched on, make the whole of the left column black, the whole of the right hand colour white, blend along the lines, and you have a pretty good games palette for easy lightshading.

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Saving

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History

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Signing off

Rich Goodwin
richard@goodwin.uk.com
Saturday, 6th February 1999

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