How to reduce colors in Photos to create C64 looking Photos?!

[Medical Officer Bones]

A fellow C64 user! Yes, I recall GEOS: I was a GUI nut even before the term "GUI designer" was ever coined. GEOS was sloooooowwww, though, I agree.

After the C64/C128 I switched to an Amstrad CPC 664, followed up by an Amiga 1000 (courtesy of the parents), and from there more Amigas. Then unfortunately the Amiga era ended (I held on to my Amiga till the latter half of the nineties!) before getting my first Windows 95 box.

Good times.

[Spockie]

GEOS isn't slow, if you use a hardware accelerator. GEOS with SuperCPU (20 times the speed of the original C64), RAMLink and HD works like a dream.

Back to topic: I think you are searching for the Affinity Photo equivalent of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL13LKIhwPI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kOoI0VC5to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAWa3DcjAEE

 

Anyone has any idea if at least part of that is also possible with Affinity Photo?

[laptopleon]

@Spockie Meanwhile, those vids are set to private. I can't see them, so it's hard to see what you mean. Can you make them public or show alternatives?

I've been trying to do this myself: Using a custom color palette in Affinity Photo, but it simply isn't there.

It's a basic, but very useful tool. It's also widely used for creating knitting patterns and such. I must admit I was quite surprised to learn that Affinity Photo can't do this. I suppose it's a consequence of Affinity Photo not being started in the early days of the internet / personal computers, where limitations of memory and thus color depth were a fact of digital life.

[NotMyFault]

22 hours ago, laptopleon said:

Using a custom color palette in Affinity Photo, but it simply isn't there.

Really? Try the attached.

Swatches>Burger>Import Palette

C64.afpalette

[laptopleon]

Now you made me have my hopes up again! So I tried again.

Yes, you can create a custom colour palette. Yes, you can save it, reload it, even adjust it, load in into other documents.. But you can't apply it to the image. That's the weird thing. You can't apply the palette to an image.

So now it's just that: A set of colours in a colourpicker.

You can export as a gif in 2^nth number of colors, but not for example 7 colors and you can't pick the colors or change them.

I wonder how far the LUT function can take us on this queeste though. In theory it could do the same thing. You still need a way to get from a palette to a LUT though. It's not a 3-second routine you have at your disposal. I should investigate that option more.

[lacerto]

(...)

 

[v_kyr]

In addition to what @Lagarto showed for/via gradients, see also related how to get a color palette from a doc:

• Using Swatches in Affinity Photo to Create and Save Gradients

Quote

Creating gradients can be done by picking colours from the image, but an easier way is to use a document palette created as a swatch. Then after you created the gradient, it can be handy to re-edit it later or even re-use it another day. Swatches can help here too.

 

Other than that, the Python script shown above in this thread will already do a conversion and can be easily modified to deal with arbitrary passed over image input/output files. Of course it can also be modified in terms of used colors handling.

[Whatthejones]

Hey guys hoping this helps. You can actually export an image palletized via the PNG format in the export tab. go to file>export> use PNG as your settings click on “more…” at the bottom. check palettized and  set the number of colors (it only gives you a finite amount to choose from.  then it should achieve a similar result!

[NotMyFault]

4 minutes ago, Whatthejones said:

Hey guys hoping this helps. You can actually export an image palletized via the PNG format in the export tab. go to file>export> use PNG as your settings click on “more…” at the bottom. check palettized and  set the number of colors (it only gives you a finite amount to choose from.  then it should achieve a similar result!

 

 

 

Hi Whatthejones,

 

welcome to the forum, and thank you for sharing.

unfortunately, we discussed this option before, and it does not solve the actual problem.

• Affinity can create palettes from documents, but not the C64 ones
• Affinity can export palletised PNGs, but not using the C64 color palette 
• There is no function to create a palletised version of a given image using a user selected palette (like C64)
• You could manually try to separate colors (often used as preparation for print, with 4 colors), but this would be really time-consuming to do with such big palette.

To summarise, if you need these function, you need to look elsewhere outside the Affinity offering.

As a hint for future posts: forum user prefer to get screenshots made by the available apps like snipping tool or snip & stitch over taking camera images from the display.