Color Palettes for Classic-Style Graphics Projects

This page gathers suggested limited-color palettes that graphics artists (for example, “pixel artists”) and game developers can decide to adopt for their projects, when they wish for their creations to have a “classic” or “retro” look (for example, one that is characteristic of the year 1995 or earlier). Almost all of these palettes have 256 colors or fewer.

The color palettes suggested are as follows.

Any 16-color or 256-color repertoire that was used in a significant volume of application and video-game graphics before the year 2000 is also suggested.3

Additional color palettes suggested are as follows.

The following color palettes are within the spirit of this page, but not preferred:

Notes:

  1. The palettes directory of this repository hosts palette files for many of the color combinations described earlier. The palette files are designed for use in software programs for drawing, especially those devoted to pixel art.
  2. The palette can have one or more sequences of colors that smoothly range from one color to another, to aid in achieving gradient fills or other specialized shading techniques in a ramp color model. For example, a palette can have ten colors (indexed from 0 through 9) that range from black to green, and ten additional colors (indexed from 10 through 19) that range from black to red.5

License

Any copyright to this page is released to the Public Domain. In case this is not possible, this page is also licensed under the Unlicense.

Notes

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  1. The “safety palette”, also known as the “Web safe” colors, consists of 216 colors that are uniformly spaced in the red–green–blue color cube. Robert Hess’s article “The Safety Palette”, 1996, described the advantage that images that use only colors in this palette won’t dither when displayed by Web browsers on displays that can show up to 256 colors at once. (See also Wikipedia. Dithering is the scattering of colors in a limited set to simulate colors outside that set.) When the “safety palette” forms part of a 256-color repertoire, as it usually does, 40 slots are left that can be filled with additional colors, and as Hess mentions, graphics designers have no control over what these additional colors are. Usually these additional colors include the four Windows-specific colors plus the eight VGA palette colors not already in the “safety palette”. For Java’s BufferedImage.TYPE_BYTE_INDEXED, these 40 colors are gray tones not already in the “safety palette”. ↩

  2. The Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) video driver for Windows version 3.1 supports 16 logical colors, but only 15 “physical” colors: the VGA palette is used, except the logical color (192, 192, 192) is missing and often replaced with a dithered mixture of dark gray and “white” (which is one possible way to adapt images colored using the VGA palette to the EGA driver). ↩

  3. In the Windows version 3.1 system palette, “the low-intensity system color values for the VGA [driver] are different from those for the [IBM] 8514 [video driver]” (Windows 3.1 SDK, Programmer’s Reference Volume 1, section 23.2.2), but how exactly they differ is not set forth in any article, as far as I am aware. ↩

  4. A “half-and-half mixture” of two colors is found by averaging their three components then rounding each average up to the nearest integer. ↩ ↩2

  5. See also:
    Chapter 4 of Woo, Mason, et al., OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 1.1, second edition, Addison Wesley Longman, 1997. ISBN 0-201-46138-2.
    D. Rogerson, “OpenGL IV: Color Index Mode” (Jan. 19, 1995). ↩ ↩2