![]() | 16PalMake 16 colour palette editor for RiscOS | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
16PalMake ![]() Disclaimer Background Use Tools · Selection tools · Whole palette tools · Dragging · Channels · 256-colour import · Saving History Signing off !HTML³ |
Disclaimer![]()
BackgroundOnce 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.
UseI hope your mouse buttons are in good working order...
All that will become clear if you read on... (I hope!)
ToolsThere 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.
Selection toolsTo 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.
Whole palette toolsThese 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 ;-)
DraggingYou 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.
ChannelsBy 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!
256-colour palette importPalMaker 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.
SavingThe 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.
History
Signing offIf 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
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