Figured this'd be the best place to ask.

Basically, I'm looking for a program that can take a picture, and reduce the color count and palette to one of my choosing.

For example, if I put in a normal photo, but tell it to only use red, blue, and green, it would change the colors on that photo to the closest color of my choosing, which in this example are only 0,0,255 0,255,0 and 255,0,0.

Get what I'm saying?

Anybody know of a program that can do this?

Off the top of my head, Photoshop can do this.

I'm looking for something preferably freeware or easy to "acquire", if you catch my drift.
I don't have photoshop on this computer.

how does one do that on PS? I'd suggest GIMP (since it's a freeware picture editing program vaguely like PS) but I have no idea if it has the same filters that can do that as PS does.

graphicsgale

GIMP can do this (Colors --> saturize or smthn like that, mess around.)

If i get what you're looking for, you're trying to achieve the same effect that one of those Obama-esque posters?

Graphicsgale.
All Frames>>Color Depth, enter number of colors

This is mostly for pixel art, though.

If Metaru is right, and that's what you're trying to do, isn't there an Obama-nator or something online.

yes there is i believe. but that is rather vector based

Yes, that's what I want to do.
Does graphicsgale allow me to specify exactly the colors I want it to come out as? Or rather, let me choose a small palette for the picture to turn into?
Yeah, I basically want to "obama-fy" something, but not by vectoring. Same basic premise though.

This is how i would do it in Paint Shop Pro:

Reduce the Color depth to 3 colors (4bit)

Manually replace the three colors you want to stay (at this point you can
-edit directly the indexed palette entries/colors
-set the color depth back to 32bit and just color replace them)

????

Profit
Any other software would work in the same way as long as it allows you to set the color depth to an specific amount of colors(less you can have is 2, of course.)
PS: 4bit doesnt mean 4 colors it means its a 16 color image with only 3 palette entries..

wait, wait, wait

so I can only set it to Bittage?
I can't be like "yeah, I only want 7 colors" and put it to 7 colors?

(12-11-2009, 10:43 PM)Lv47Thief Metaru Wrote: PS: 4bit doesnt mean 4 colors it means its a 16 color image with only 3 palette entries..

if you use from 3 to 16 colors, its a 4 bit color depth image.
if you use 256 or less colors, its a 8 bit color depth image.
and so on.
as i said earlier, "as long as it allows you to set the color depth to an specific amount of colors" you shouldn't have any problem to do it just like i did it. because all i did was tell the software to render the image using only three colors from the palette instead of using 16, since the idea is to mimic an obama poster and those are made with just 3 colors.

the above its just an example on how you could achieve that effect without using vectors.

Right. Thanks.
I figured out how to get the effect, but is there any way to tell it the colors I want it to use beforehand?

dont think so. unless you heavily edit the image first.