Graphics Nihal's Pallette Collection - [Update 6.2] CGA Palettes!

[NihalRahman123]

I was in a bit of a conflict one day, I never liked how doom looked in high bitdepth rendering/ Hardware rendering, but also with software rendering, the limited color palette gave it a charm but I didn't like some of the aesthetic choices made. So, wanted to make my own palette. Which lead to making many different palettes. soon. I plan on making a wide collection of creative but practical palettes. These are available as either a mod to swap the palette or modder resource for WADs or maps, but if you are using these in your project Remember to Credit. 

 

This should work in any sourceport (maybe except OpenGL ones that doesn't use palettes). Even works on GZdoom with limited support (only uses the first palette, item and damage flashes are hardcoded values). I personally tested with Prboom+, GZDoom and DSDA Doom. Let me know any issues are things that you dislike about these palettes, I will take a look at them and update.

I also do palette requests, you can ask in this thread or take it up to DMs. If it is for a commercial/paid project, it will have to be a paid comission, otherwise, Free!

[ Changelog ]

Spoiler

[Update 6.2]
- Added CGA M4P0 palette

[Update 6.1]
- Added CGA M5 palette

[Update 6]
- Added CGA M4P1 palette

[Update 5]
- Added Mexico palette
- Updated text to include message about palette requests

[Update 4]
- Added a new sin city themed palette
- Added more fancy images to the post

[Update 3]
- Added a new black and white palette

[Update 2]
- Added a new technicolor palette

[Update 1]
- Refactored the whole post
- Added a balanced version of Base Palette
- Changed the base palette slightly
- Added better screenshots

 

Spoiler

Because I am a DI (Digital intermediate) person, this simple palette was made with more complexity than it should have (Advanced color management stuff, proprietary software etc.), and I feel like I could have done a much better job (looking at the colormap). The goal was to not fix the colors going from red to brown and etc, it is to make that effect more pleasing to look at. Almost all colors have been changed, notably red and blues. Achromatic values are given some color, so the overall palette is a little more vibrant, even though it mutes some color that were too chromatic in my tastes. this palette has 2 version, one is punchy other is balanced. Balanced version has a more balanced contrast to fit with doom's general values used in the palette, this should help with darker levels and readability but looks (personally) worse. the Punchy version is the same but with a more contrasty look, which looks nicer subjectively speaking.

 

All 14 doom palettes were manually altered, the damage/berserk flashes are not a blend but a color multiply, which means they will make everything look red, not blend a constant red color over your vision, also the intensity of the effect is reduced. Same for the yellow flashes and rad suit. but they are subject to change, they were done last minute and not a whole lot of testing was made on them.

 

Punchy:

Balanced:

 

Screenshots:

 

Spoiler

These screenshots were captures in DSDA Doom. This is the punchy version of the base palette.
Last screenshot has the rad suit effect. 

 

Download Here

 

 

Spoiler

Oldschool 2 strip film process, no green is seen anywhere everything is either a shade of red or blue or anything in between. You get blue bfg shots and tracers, blue baron projectiles, blue barrels etc. Rad suit effect is now a nice blue color instead of green. Damage and item flashes are a modified shade of orange and yellow.

Optimized my palette workflow so I make crunch out palettes much faster and iterate quicker.

 

Screenshots:

Spoiler

These screenshots were captured in DSDA Doom. Last screenshot has the radsuit effect applied

 

Download Here

 

 

Spoiler

Its a black and white palette, but not a digital black and white palette. the weights of the different colors are based of orthochromatic film, which means anything red will appear darker and anything blue will appear much lighter, this helps with separating tones between the 2 colors and creates for a black and white look that is better than your average black and white look. Damage effects , item and rad suit are tints with colors, but there will a version where even those are black and white for purity's sake  [ You can disable palette effect for powerups and pickups and damages in most sourceports ]. This palette will naturally be darker than normal doom and that is something if altered will not look the same.



Screenshots:

Spoiler

 

These screenshots were captured in DSDA Doom. Last screenshot has the radsuit effect applied

Download Here

Spoiler

Sin city themed palette. Black and white with some the Reds being visible and vibrant. This one has some more nuance. Its not *actually* black and white, the film had some color in the black and white parts like some yellow hues in the highlights and colder tones in the darks. that is visible in this palette. This might require some changes but the reds are handpicked and tuned in the palette so that every shade looks natural. The item pickup and rad suit change the hue of the red to their own colors instead of blending a color in the screen, damage or berzerk will make the whole screen gradually pure red. I might alter the invincible colormap to more thematic later. This is also quite dark so if it is affecting gameplay too much, consider changing some brightness contrast in your source port of choice.



Screenshots:

Spoiler

These screenshots were captured in DSDA Doom

Grab it Here

 

 

Spoiler

Mexico palette is a re-envisioning of doom via the lens of an American Hollywood colorist's perception of Mexico. Or you can call this the Piss palette. Nothing too sophisticated here it makes everything look like Mexiwood. Blues are noticeably diminished, that's all I have to say about this palette. This was done via a request from jo2ukegappy. No custom behaving blend palettes this time. Time for E1Mexico1. Even tho this is more of a joke/non serious palette, i did try my best to make it look decent within the confounds of horribleness.

Screenshots:

Spoiler

These were taken in DSDA-Doom

Grab it Here

 

 

Spoiler

Palette inspired by CGA palette. This is not a strict CGA palette, aka this is not in 4 bit and does not change the brightness/contrast of the image significantly, this retains doom color depth but changes everything to have the colors of the CGA palette. M4P1 stands for Mode 4 palette 1, which is the palette with only Cyans and Magentas, and different shades of white gray and blacks. Damage blend is magenta, item pickups are gray and radsuit blend is cyan.



Screenshots:

Spoiler

These were captured in DSDA-Doom. Last screenshot is using the Radsuit effect. First 2 screenshots has a bug where the yellow keycard is not white as the final versions.

Grab it Here

Spoiler

Read the Description for CGA M4P1, its the same thing except replace all magenta with red. I think this looks really nice even outside of the novelty



Screenshots:

Spoiler

These were captured in DSDA-Doom.

Grab it Here

 

Spoiler

Read the Description for CGA M4P1, its the same thing except Its Yellow Green and Red only. Bit of a whacky look but i think some people might like it. This is a mexiwood filter in spirit.



Screenshots:

Spoiler

These were captured in DSDA-Doom

Grab it Here

 

Edited August 15, 2023 by NihalRahman123 : added new content

[Corvus262]

The effect of the color changes is immediately noticeable and I really like it, I was trying to make something like this for a while and I never managed to get it to look this good.

[s4f3s3x]

I think the result does not look very balanced brightness-wise, there's too much contrast and the colors are overly saturated. If this is what you were going after then cool, but personally I find it a bit excessive

[plums]

8 hours ago, NihalRahman123 said:

They are also large images sorry about that :p

I don't think this matters since you spoilered them all, but just to let you know, if you add a lowercase L to the filename before the extension on imgur, it will auto-resize it to be max 640x640. It's a cool feature that not a lot of people know about. Smaller sizes are available too, see this for some more info.

 

example: https://i.imgur.com/uGpfVa4l.png

 

Anyhow this is very high contrast, will have to try it in game to see how it looks, seems like you did a good job though.

[NihalRahman123]

Made some major changes to the post. Also update the palette to have a balanced version with toned down contrast but keep the vibrant colors. Also plan on making many many more palettes in the future so keep an eye out.

need to figure out a faster pipeline to make and test palettes. 

Here is a interesting test.

[NihalRahman123]

Upcoming new palette: Bipack

Oldschool 2 strip film process, no green is seen anywhere everything is either a shade of red or blue or anything in between. You get blue bfg shots and tracers, blue baron projectiles, blue barrels etc. Rad suit effect is now a nice blue color instead of green. Damage and item flashes are a modified shade of orange and yellow.

Optimized my palette workflow so I make crunch out palettes much faster and iterate quicker.

 

 

Screenshots

Spoiler

 

[liPillON]

the download for the base palette in the OP seems to be for the punchy variant

is there a link for the balanced version, too?

 

[NihalRahman123]

12 minutes ago, liPillON said:

the download for the base palette in the OP seems to be for the punchy variant

is there a link for the balanced version, too?

 

Oops! forgot to update the download link, fixed now. Try the link again, it should be a zip with both wads

[NihalRahman123]

Next up: Orthochromatic palette

Its a black and white palette, but not a digital black and white palette. the weights of the different colors are based of orthochromatic film, which means anything red will appear darker and anything blue will appear much lighter, this helps with separating tones between the 2 colors and creates for a black and white look that is better than your average black and white look. Damage effects , item and rad suit are tints with colors, but there will a version where even those are black and white for purity's sake. This palette will naturally be darker than normal doom and that is something if altered will not look the same

 

Screenshots:

Quote

 

[Walter confetti]

Charming modifications!

[taufan99]

Bole So Nihal, Sat Sri Akal! (sorry, couldn't help lol)

 

Nice palettes btw. The first one is rather subtle to me, if not a bit too contrasting perhaps. The monochrome one would be good for mappers aiming to make mapsets centered around early 20th century silent films, horror, etc.

[NihalRahman123]

1 hour ago, taufan99 said:

 

The first one is rather subtle to me, if not a bit too contrasting perhaps.

A balanced versions exists which is more akin to dooms normal contrast, and ye it is subtle, but major changes are in the blues, reds and greens, with whites having a blue shade to them (and various other minor changes).

Also thank you!

[NihalRahman123]

Next up going to experiment with CRT colors and maybe halftone print emulation, we will see. Ill make more artistic palettes after these 2

While experimenting, it seems assuming a wide gamut for the default palette ends up creating a nicer palette with slighty muted extreame colors like blues and the pink patch, this might a good candidate for Vanilla+ style palette.

Edited August 11, 2023 by NihalRahman123

[NihalRahman123]

Next up: Luminous

Luminous aims to make bright parts of the palette even brighter, giving it a senstation of high exposure. It also aims to fix the yellow skewing of some explosion and fire sprites to retain a more natural color. Greens are brighter, blue patch it brighter too. significant changes to red and orange patches. Things will have a pseudo-brightmap vibe without using brightmaps. You will see significant changes to weapon muzzle flashes, monster projectiles, green colored anything, plasma rifle effects, fire and red colored effects etc. there are some misc minor changes. Other than that, no major aesthethic changes are made, most flats and the overall look should still feel like doom, just glowing things are more glowy.

This is most likely going to get updates in the future, because making things brighter is a delicate balance between not breaking a certain spirtes and flats and making things look nicer with high luminosity

Screenshots:

Spoiler

Ingame:

Spoiler

These are captured in DSDA Doom

Certain Sprites:
 

Spoiler

These are captured in Slade 3:

 

You should notice they no longer have the sort of out of place yellow colors in these effects, they look much more natural

 

 

[DoomGappy]

This is really cool. I play Doom generally with an assortment of mods onto it, so I noticed that when I played the game with the Orthochromatic pallette and Smooth Weapons Enhanced, the weapons were still normally colored. Is that to be expected? Also, congratilations. Playing this gave me major Sin City vibes. 

BFG and punch

[NihalRahman123]

12 minutes ago, jo2ukegappy said:

This is really cool. I play Doom generally with an assortment of mods onto it, so I noticed that when I played the game with the Orthochromatic pallette and Smooth Weapons Enhanced, the weapons were still normally colored. Is that to be expected?

BFG and punch

Smooth doom uses png spirtes, which dont get affected by palette's, including certain graphics in your HUD mod too, tho hud not getting affecting by palettes isnt that big of an issue. There is a thread where someone converted it to doom gfx that can use palettes in doomworld, hope that helps! Here is the post: Here

Simple fix would be to use the palette tonemapper.

Speaking of which I need to make a Sin city palette proper with the reds being visible.

also that CRT shader is neat 

Edited August 13, 2023 by NihalRahman123

[DoomGappy]

Thanks for the reply, Ill check it out. Why do they use png for sprites, though? Damn, I'm still really a novice in this after all. And thanks for the compliment, I really like the shader too. Here it is with the punchy pallette. It looks really good.
 

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 13, 2023 by jo2ukegappy

[NihalRahman123]

54 minutes ago, jo2ukegappy said:

Thanks for the reply, Ill check it out. Why do they use png for sprites, though? Damn, I'm still really a novice in this after all. And thanks for the compliment, I really like the shader too. Here it is with the punchy pallette. It looks really good.
 

 

Cant see the images, broken links?

[DoomGappy]

10 minutes ago, NihalRahman123 said:

 

Cant see the images, broken links?

 

Sorry, tried to link from google drive. Apparently it doesn't work as I thought it woudl .Should be fixed now. 

[NihalRahman123]

3 minutes ago, jo2ukegappy said:

 

Sorry, tried to link from google drive. Apparently it doesn't work as I thought it woudl .Should be fixed now. 

Love it with the CRT shader

[DoomGappy]

3 minutes ago, NihalRahman123 said:

Love it with the CRT shader

Thanks, I just posted it here in case you want to test it.

[RonLivingston]

I love the pallets, they look nicer then ever

[NihalRahman123]

New Palette! Sin City Palette

Check OP for more info

[NihalRahman123]

If anyone has any sort of palette requests ( niche little thing i know but still ) , lemme know

[OpenRift]

2 hours ago, NihalRahman123 said:

If anyone has any sort of palette requests ( niche little thing i know but still ) , lemme know

Grindhouse Palette. I think you know what I mean.

[DoomGappy]

4 hours ago, NihalRahman123 said:

If anyone has any sort of palette requests ( niche little thing i know but still ) , lemme know

 

Mexico in American movies palette.

 

 

And Maybe Gen 6's piss filter, as a joke, if you feeel like it.

 

[Edit]
 

Also, don't know if you've seen it, but this is a sprite map museum kinda thing that allows you to see all the sprites for the monsters in-game easily. Might help with your color mapping. 

Edited August 13, 2023 by jo2ukegappy

[NihalRahman123]

6 hours ago, OpenRift said:

Grindhouse Palette. I think you know what I mean.

Aight, [ Ok i think im a little confused but you can take it up to DMs if you want ]

 

 

4 hours ago, jo2ukegappy said:

 

Mexico in American movies palette.

 

 

And Maybe Gen 6's piss filter, as a joke, if you feeel like it.

 

[Edit]
 

Also, don't know if you've seen it, but this is a sprite map museum kinda thing that allows you to see all the sprites for the monsters in-game easily. Might help with your color mapping. 

Alright. Also sprite museum seems helpful, but slade is pretty good at previewing, tho that might be good for final tests.

[NihalRahman123]

6 hours ago, jo2ukegappy said:

 

Mexico in American movies palette.

 

Done! Check OP for more info

[DoomGappy]

19 minutes ago, NihalRahman123 said:

Done! Check OP for more info

 

Really cool, I really enjoyed the purple armor and purple arachnotron's eyes.

 

 

[OpenRift]

16 hours ago, NihalRahman123 said:

Aight, [ Ok i think im a little confused but you can take it up to DMs if you want ]

What I mean is like the kind of colors you see from filmstock from the 70s and early 80s, especially in low-budget b-movies and stuff like that.