The VG Resource

Hey I have been trying to bring my color count down as far a possible lately, and I have been mostly successful and have brought the count below 16 in most pieces...but a particular piece I need help with...I want to reduce the redundantly similar colors without losing detail.


here is my current palette:


and here is the image it belongs to:


not much else to add except that I think there needs to be more contrast in the piece to match my other pieces better:

they have 13 colors fyi

A quick and dirty way to get a good head start on palette reduction is by using a color depth filter in a graphics program

I use Graphics Gale, which i used to make this example



As you can see, the difference between the three isn't that noticeable, mostly because as you've already deduced, you have too many similar hues and shades

The color counts reduce from 35(your original) to 12 and then to 8

although the 8 palette result loses some detail, this is where you'd go back in manual and retouch any lost areas with your new smaller palette. Also, with such a small palette, you'll have an easier time shifting all those details around at the pixel level. A smaller palette also means that your contrast between shades will be greater, resulting in higher clarity of detail, assuming that your pixel work is adequate.


Keep in mind that this technique may be "frowned upon" by some, but It can really streamline workflow if you are one of those "paint first, pixel later" types.

Hope this helps

The Paint first, reduce later method is a perfectly valid approach to going about creating pixel graphics, especially backgrounds.

The way that you would go about this in graphicsgale is by copying the RGB value of the color you're keeping in your palette (when you set the color depth for an image in graphics gale, you get a palette you can fiddle with) and pasting the RGB value into the selected color that you're replacing it with. after this, in the same window (all of this is done in the palette's dropdown menu when you click the little arrow) you would use the "Unite Duplicate Colors" tool or if you go about changing the colors with the color replacement tool, "Remove Unused Colors" works too (but you have to make sure that the color you're getting rid of is completely gone from the image)