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Blastfrog

Making a custom palette: seeking feedback on how to improve it

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I'm trying to make a custom palette that fades nicely and covers a decent range of hues and saturation levels. I've organized it as follows: first the greyscale, then the saturated colors, then the desaturated colors, and finally the "support" colors. The support colors are intended to help the previous colors fade a bit better by covering some of the resulting RGB values that aren't in the rest of the palette. I've tried to have as little redundant or very close colors as possible, as I figure the necessary colors could be borrowed from other ranges (for example, using the top shades of desaturated red to fill out the upper ranges of saturated red).

However, I feel like I might be missing something important, or that it could be improved in some way. One thing that's annoying me are the spurious green pixels in the brown fades. I'm also not sure if I sacrificed shades too much in favor of covering a wide range of hues and saturation levels.

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You can eliminate some color bleeding by blacking out parts of the palette you don't want to bleed into other parts to generate different colormaps and then exporting them to stitch the results together in an image editor. SLADE3 will recognise COLORMAPs once they've been imported and converted to flats.

Smooth and relatively flat textures won't look great in game without smooth shading gradients in the palette, but if you intend to use rough looking noisy textures then you'll be fine.

Looks very nice though, especially the yellows.

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Something I saw recently that I found interesting:

If you make a gradient straight from your base color to white you can sometimes have an undesired hue. For example Red to white pass through a pink color. (Orange arrows)

You need to slightly turn the color to a lighter part of the color wheel. (Green arrows) to compensate.




The same is true to the darker gradients. Specially with the yellow:


This is interesting for making palettes and for making colormaps.

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why u dont make colors in darkness share gray shades? Colors don't work in darkness... ever wondered why IR cameras are gray? or dogs beign color blind in darkness? even human eye is colorblind in darkness so why saturating dark colors >.<

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could you provide a PWAD so we can try out your palette in-game?

Also, I like Medis' idea of desaturating colors the more they are shaded, maybe you could try this out?

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Linguica said:

But... light red IS pink? What does curving through orangey-pink accomplish?

It's all about very subjective notions, because what makes a color a color according to our brains and according to physics aren't always the same notion.

The idea of shifting hue along a color range, instead of just shifting saturation/luminosity, has been used in Doom wads before (e.g. BTSX).

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I always wondered if Doom would look cooler if the color ranges gradient into a second color before fading to black. Like a light blues fade to a dark violet, or yellow fading to orange, to brown, etc.

I dont mess around enough with pallettes to see if it would work. New palletes are the weirdest popular thing right now. Dooms default pallete looks great to me.

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Hue shifts are pretty awesome. Not only do they just look cool in general and make for some neat color-gradient effects when the colormap is applied, but I think they can create the appearance of slightly higher color depth, too, by adding additional hues within each ramp.

One hue-shifting palette trick I'm fond of is to use hue-shifting to create several partial color ramps (shorter ramps, containing bright colors only) that all fade down into a single, shared darker ramp. For example, if you're wanting to squeeze lots of cool neon colors into your palette, you can have several bright cyans, blues, and purples all fading down into the same dark bluish ramp.

I used this method for SpaceDM9's purples and cyans, which were all built to fade seamlessly into the same blue ramp. Another example is in BTSX's colormap, where the bottom of Doom's small orange ramp is attached to an existing ramp of desaturated reds, which they fade reasonably well into.

Medis said:

why u dont make colors in darkness share gray shades? Colors don't work in darkness... ever wondered why IR cameras are gray? or dogs beign color blind in darkness? even human eye is colorblind in darkness so why saturating dark colors >.<

This is true, but you'd have to be careful applying it to a Doom palette, since dark shades aren't only used in dark sector lighting.

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Gez said:

Something I saw recently that I found interesting:

This is interesting for making palettes and for making colormaps.

How are those color wheels made? Is there an easy, known algorithm, like some pseudocode that you know of?

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fabian said:

could you provide a PWAD so we can try out your palette in-game?

Thing is, it was meant for a TC, Doom graphics don't translate particularly well to it. Having just switched to QZDoom, this palette is no longer relevant to anything I'm doing with my TC.

kb1 said:

How are those color wheels made? Is there an easy, known algorithm, like some pseudocode that you know of?

I'd like to know the same. It'd be very interesting to see it applied to a true-color renderer.

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