Indexed Color Palette
An image stored as numbers pointing into a small palette, the format behind GIF and early video-game graphics. Limiting colors to as few as 16 or 256 gives a retro look with dithering to hide banding.
Spot it
- 01Limited retro palette
- 02Dithering dot patterns
- 03Stepped color banding
Why it happens
Chooses a palette of at most 256 colors, then replaces each pixel with the index of its nearest palette color, often spreading the rounding error to neighbors with dithering.
Recreate it in Pixio
Image edit prompt“Convert this image to an indexed color palette of 16 colors: use a limited retro palette with visible ordered dithering patterns to simulate gradients, hard stepped banding in skies and skin, and crisp pixel-level noise. No smooth gradients. Keep the original subject and composition recognizable.”
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