07-21-2012, 09:08 AM
I don't know how other people pick their colors, I usually just type in values for HSV. I rarely use alpha.
There are actually two .PAL formats, the Microsoft one ans JASC, both supported by different programs. GraphicsGale and GIMP read JASC, for example, I'm not sure about MS Pals (except that VBA exports them and I think PS can save them, too).
The JASC Palette format is quite simple. They're plain text files. First line is "JASC_PAL", second line is "0100" (format version), third line is number of colours (should be "16" or "256" I heard, some programs might support ofther numbers). Then come the colors, each in a separate line as RGB values (like "127 127 255", "0 0 0"...).
MS Pals are more complicated. Four bytes for the identifier "RIFF", four bytes for the file length, eight bytes "PAL data", four bytes for the data size (usually file size - 0x20 bytes (header)), 2 bytes for the version number (usually 0x0003). Now two bytes for the color count (usually 0x0001 -> 256 (little endian!)). Then there should be four bytes per color in ABGR (again, little endian; if you read as big endian, it's RGBA). I don't think A is actually used, though.
There are actually two .PAL formats, the Microsoft one ans JASC, both supported by different programs. GraphicsGale and GIMP read JASC, for example, I'm not sure about MS Pals (except that VBA exports them and I think PS can save them, too).
The JASC Palette format is quite simple. They're plain text files. First line is "JASC_PAL", second line is "0100" (format version), third line is number of colours (should be "16" or "256" I heard, some programs might support ofther numbers). Then come the colors, each in a separate line as RGB values (like "127 127 255", "0 0 0"...).
MS Pals are more complicated. Four bytes for the identifier "RIFF", four bytes for the file length, eight bytes "PAL data", four bytes for the data size (usually file size - 0x20 bytes (header)), 2 bytes for the version number (usually 0x0003). Now two bytes for the color count (usually 0x0001 -> 256 (little endian!)). Then there should be four bytes per color in ABGR (again, little endian; if you read as big endian, it's RGBA). I don't think A is actually used, though.