PalMaker 16PalMake  16 colour palette editor for RiscOS
Help for
16PalMake

-
 Disclaimer
 Background
 Use
 Tools
 · Selection tools
 · Whole palette tools
 · Dragging
 · Channels
 · 256-colour import
 · Saving
 History
 Signing off


Designed using
!HTML³

    About this program...
    Purpose: Create 16 colour palettes
    Author: Richard Goodwin
    Status: Freeware

    This program is © Rich Goodwin 1999; it may be freely distributed if:

    • All files remain intact and unaltered
    • No unreasonable charge is made
    Version: 0.02 (January 2000)
    Features: Drag and drop merge, copy or swap; blending, flips, shifts; import 16 colour palattes in four styles; individual RGB channel control; Risc OS picker for RGB, HSV and CMYK colour picking
    Web: http://www.goodwin.uk.com/richard/programs/


    Disclaimer

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

    Once upon a time I needed a good 256 colour palette editor for colourising graphics, and couldn't find what I needed; so I wrote one myself - with lots of tools for darkening, lightening, rotating colours and so on. It even had three flavours of drag-and-drop editing. Then I needed a 16 colour palette editor and decided to write that into my HTML tool HTML³. Despite not having a proper save facility, this was fine for a while; it had blends, colour picker, inversion, flipping, and so on, and would save into an internal directory which I could get access to without too much of a problem. However, then I needed to create a palette with the mouse colours set to soemthing other than the default colours. Problem.

    I was going to lash together HTML³'s palette editor into a separate program, but then I decided, what the hell, let's go to town and get all those bells and whistles from the 256 colour palette editor working for me... And here it is.

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    Use

    I hope your mouse buttons are in good working order...

    Mouse operations on the colour window
    Mouse operationIn plain EnglishAction
    Select: left mouse, single clicknothing (but see Adjust)
    Menu: middle mouse buttonbring up standard menu - basically allows you to do a quick palette save
    Adjust: right mouse buttonstart a selection; click Select to end
    Double-click: left mouse button click twice quicklyedit colour (using colour picker)
    Drag: left mouse button held down and pointer moved aroundone 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 operationAction
    Select: open colour window
    Menu: bring up menu
    Adjust: open tools window

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    Tools

    There are essentially two different types of tools in the tools window - those which can be used at any time and affect the whole of the main 16 colour palette in one go, and those which require an area to be selected. The "Selection" tools come first.

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    Selection tools

    To create a select area, click on a colour at the start (or end) of the area you want to change with the RIGHT mouse button (Adjust); then go to the other end and click Select (the LEFT mouse button). You should see that the area selected has been "slabbed in". You can of course select the whole palette by selecting the first and last colours, or there's a "Select all" button which will select the 16 colours of the main palette (the four icons marked M are the mouse colours, so having "Select all" select these would be a little silly). The smallest area you can select is one colour. To deselect the area, just click on the colour area; any operation such as selecting a new area, or dragging colours around, will also cancel the currently select area. There's also a "Clear selection" button.
    • 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 16 greyscale palette. You could of course blend right over the mouse colours tool, but again, that would be a little silly. 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 16 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, so you reverse them .
    • 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

    These tools affect the whole palette - or at least, the 16 colours that make up the true palette, missing out the 4 mouse colours. It doesn't matter what area is selected, these options just dont care, so use with caution! You can usually undo any damage by re-applying the effect once or twice (or, in th worse case, re-apply 14 times ;-)
    • 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 15; a proper inversion/reverse of this will put black in 15 and white in 0. A flip, on the other hand, has black in 12 and white in 3.

    • 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 15) - 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 4 times; I don't know why you'd want to shift left or right, but included them for completeness ;)

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    Dragging

    You can drag a colour in the palette from one position to a new one; by default this will Copy the contents of the first colour into the second one, which is useful if you haven't quite got the colour in the right place. For instance, if you create a black to red to white palette and it looks a little dark, you might want to move the red up a row and re-blend it.

    Swap exchanges the first and second colours, so if you have the colours in the wrong place but don't want to lose either of them you can do a swap, or a number of swaps, to move things around.

    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

    By switching on and off the channels you can apply any and all of the above tools to just the red, green or blue (or in combination to yellow, magenta or cyan) parts of the colour; so, for instance, if a palette looks a little too glaring red, you can darken the red channel and it looks a little more brown, or lighten the green channel to make it more orange (as red and green go to make yellow in the RGB colour model). This takes a little geting used to, and can lead to some weird effects!

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    256-colour palette import

    PalMaker uses 16 colour palettes; however, RISC OS sprites also allow 256 colour palettes to be used. By dropping one of these palettes onto 16PalMake you can load these as well as proper 16 colour palettes, but obviously some information is lost - only every 17th colour is used. This is fine if the 256 colour palette was a smooth gradient, but if it was a fairly random collection of colours - for instance, a "best fit" palette from a GIF image - chances are it won't be very usable. Even if it was a smooth gradient, I'd suggest going over it with a few manual blends here and there just to iron out any rought spots.

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    Saving

    The save box is, despite it being tacked onto the end of the tools window, a conventional save box - you can type in full path names and click "OK", or drag the palette icon to the filer window of your choice. At the moment RAM transfer isn't supported, as !Paint seems to be broken in this respect. I thought it might be my dodgy programming, but it gives the same incorrect error messages when I try to do saves from other programs that I haven't written (like Photodesk 3), so either Paint is broken or everything else is.

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    History

    Release history
    0.01  First release  A one evening lash together from the 256 colour version, so I can get on with designing palettes for my RISC OS themes manager. Hopefully the pointer will stop changing from that nice green stuff to the dodgy blue and red when travelling over web browsers and so on.
    0.02  Minor update  It tells you which colour (or mouse colour) you're editing in the colour picker title bar. More useful in the 256 colour version! Web pages launch even if browser isn't currently loaded.

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    Signing off

    If you like this, let me know by emailing richard@goodwin.uk.com You might also be interested in !HTML3 - a HTML helper, which just happens to have a 16 colour palette editor built in. It can be found at http://www.goodwin.uk.com/richard/programs/html3/

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

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