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Mapping to the PICO-8 palette, perceptually
September 7th, 2025 Given a palette and an image, how would you map each pixel to a color in the palette? In this article we’ll investigate how an advanced perceptual color space (CAM16-UCS) compares to simpler alternatives. For this experiment I chose a somewhat strange cropped still from the Big Buck Bunny short and the PICO-8 fantasy console’s 16-color palette: A simple way to map pixels to palette colors is to compute the Euclidean distance between each pixel and palette color, and choose the one with the shortest distance.
For this experiment I chose a somewhat strange cropped still from the Big Buck Bunny short and the PICO-8 fantasy console’s 16-color palette: Note that this method completely discards any structure in the image, which puts a limit on how good the results can look. Just for fun, I tried pumping the luminance weight so high that we’ll be effectively reproducing a greyscale image with the PICO-8 palette:
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