Color Quantisation - 8 bit Pixel Art Convertor
This project I wanted to make something that simply takes in an image and converts it to a more retro video game 8 bit image. I had to do a bit of research into 8 bit images and color quantisation because I had a very surface understanding of what it was.
I realised that the term 8 bit art doesn’t actually attribute to the pixel art style itself but more so the art style that gaming consoles were forced to resort to due to limitations of the device. The more technical term is “NES style” or “Atari style” rather than “8-bit”.
8 bit:
- Can only store 256 colours (2^8)
Color Quantisation:
- Look into doing a Median Cut to determine the 256 colours to use for the color quantisation. The Median cut Algorithm is a sorting algorithm that works similar to bucket sort.
Turns out you can get really good graphics even with 16 bit. What I’m aiming for is something more like the limitations listed here so I’m going to follow the graphical limits:
- Color Limit 32
- Canvas converting to something like 64x64 or similar aspect ratio to reduce pixels on screen
Other Interesting sites:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_8-bit_computer_hardware_graphics
- https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/50mvo7/what_are_the_8bit_eras_graphics_limitationsrules/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_quantization
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-bit_color
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_art