Many of the paint modes in Photogenics require the use of a palette file. These files contain a set of colour values, which are used to recolour the image. You can also use them as a basis for the gradient effect. There are several preset colour palettes included with Photogenics, but you will probably want to create your own. You can do this using Photogenics' palette requester. This tutorial, will show you how to create a palette of your own.
First, open up an image. This will be used to preview your palette, to make sure that it looks right when used on a real image. Often, although a palette looks good on its own, it will not look very good in use, so its a good idea to keep checking your palette as you edit it. Open up the file 'Car.JPG', which should be in your Graphics/ExampleImages drawer. Fill the paint layer, and select the 'FalseColour' paint mode. This paint mode applies a palette to an image by replacing the colours in the image with the palette according to the image colours brightness. Dark colours in the image will take colours at the start of the palette, light parts of the image are coloured with the last colours in the palette. The default palette for false colour will probably look like some bizarre infrared photograph. Pretty though this is, it would be much better to create our own palette.
Click on the colour bar at the top of the tools window to bring up the palette window, and click on the 'Colours' button. This will open up another window, containing lots of small squares, and some buttons. The squares are the colours in your palette. The palette is arranged from the top left to the bottom right, scanning first to the right, and then down. To edit an individual colour, simply click on it. That colour will be copied to the palette window, where you can change it. As you change it in the palette window, it will also change in the colours window.
We'll start with a simple range. Try to arrange your windows so that you can see all of the two palette windows, and the picture. Click on the first colour. The colours will probably all be set to black to start with, but just to make sure, check that the brightness setting in the palette window is set to zero. Now select the last colour.
For this tutorial, we want a nice range of greens, so select a green tone on the colourwheel and move the saturation up to about half way. Set the brightness to full.This should give us a nice bright green. What we really want however, is to have a range of colours going from dark to light. We could edit each one by hand, but this would take ages and would be very difficult to get right without a lot of trial and error. Fortunately Photogenics can do this process for us. With the last colour still selected, click on the 'spread' button. Now click on the first colour again. Photogenics will fill in the colours in between with a smooth range of greens. We should check what this looks like now. Click on the save button at the bottom right of the window. This will bring up a file requester. Give the palette the name 'Tutorial.iff'. The palettes are save as 'IFF' files, just like IFF pictures, except they do not contain any image data, only colours. You can also load these into other programmes, such as 'DPaint'. Once it has saved, bring up the options window for the 'falsecolour' paintmode. This will be another file requester, this time prompting you to load in a palette. Find the file you just saved and click on 'OK'. The palette will load in, and the car will be displayed in glorious green. You may notice, that the picture appears to have lost some detail in the light and dark areas. This is because of a lack of contrast in the palette.
It is important to bear in mind when you are creating a palette that there must be some contrast between adjacent colours, in order for detail to show up. Select a colour around the middle of the third row. Make it a little brighter, and increase the hue a bit too. Spread this to the first colour. Select a colour around the middle of the sixth row and make it a little darker, shifting the hue to the left slightly. Don't spread this yet, but select the last colour and make it less saturated. Now spread this to the second colour we changed and spread that to the first. Resave this palette, and load it into FalseColour again. This time you should see a little more of the darker colours, and some more detail in the light ones. The slight change of hue also helps to add a little contrast and make the picture more interesting. You may want to experiment yourself now, so you may want to try altering the position of the light and dark shades for some good effects. If you put a light colour at the start and a dark one at the end you can create some interestng 'negative' effects. Alternately you could put a light colour in the middle and dark colours at either end. There are an almost infinite number of palettes you can create, but if you create any interesting ones, make sure you save them.