Talk:Palette (computing)

Untitled

This page looks redundant to Indexed color --Phrood 13:10, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Or, vice versa, Indexed color is redundant to this page? Tizio 16:27, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

I've recommended this article be merged into there, see talk:indexed color. --jacobolus (t) 19:54, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

The sentence "A palette may also refer to a set of frequently used symbols, tools, or other objects, available for quick access." is out of the topic. --SunnySideOfStreet

Article enterely rewritten

Hi. I've been worked in the List of palettes series of articles, and I found that the base article about computer palettes was a stub. Now it is expanded and clarified; I hope there were no (much) more "Indexed color" vs. "Palette (computing)" wars in future. And... I know, it still lacks references... -Ricardo Cancho Niemietz (talk) 19:05, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Confusion

Ricardo, where you previously had asserted that "confusion" exists, you changed to the content-free weasel-worded statement "Due to the spawning of different, often closely related meanings of the term palette in computing and in lack of standard nomenclature, some other concepts are frequently assumed and/or used instead along technical literature." If there's any meaning in this, it would come from sources that support the alleged "spawning", or the "frequently assumed" claim, or to the mentioned "technical literature." I'm not going to allow you make such assertions here without a source, when no such statement is necessary. You're in a section titled "Related terms and technologies." You can say what needs to be said about related terms and technologies, and alternative meanings, without vague reference to any spawning process, or frequent assumptions, or unspecified technical literature. If there's something to be said by way of introduction, this is not it. I'll try to edit in an alternative. Dicklyon (talk) 15:29, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

I worked on it some, trying to reduce the fluff and get closer to normal encyclopedic form. I recommend you study my changes and try to follow my lead. There is still a lot of inappropriate bolding that should be either removed or changed to italics. And the first two major sections seem to be largely duplicative in laying out the different meanings. It will take more than a copyedit to sort that out. Dicklyon (talk) 15:54, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

This is why there is confusion. I dislike your new start saying "a palette is either...", but in the first section "What a palette is", there is a large list of different meanings. Read carefully every point, and you see that every of them are more or less sighly different. Some days ago, I pointed you the many different uses of the expression "RGB palette" in different contexts in some books. Many people thinks that the display adapter CLUT is a "palette" (and so on). Indexed color technique is intimately related with the concept and the different uses of "palettes", but not all those uses are the same. Also, you stripped the expresion "...lack of standarized..." (or the like), so you invite people to think that every given expression in the article is, in fact, standarized, leading to confusion.

As I pointed out before about your RGB palette examples, they had a lot in common. It's best in the lead to say what's in common, that is, to have a broad but definite description of what the topic is that you're talking about. The previous lead didn't define the topic in the lead sentence: "the term palette has been used with different meanings, the most related with a given limited color selection for some purpose in a given environment, mainly (but not restricted to) the management of digital images." That's what I was trying to improve; feel free to make it better. Dicklyon (talk) 22:26, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Please, reword the summary paragraph. Also, there is no real overlap between the first two sections, although they are closely related. About "teasing" and "deferring", no comment. I recognize many times I am not a native English speaker, so my parlace is not, obviously, perfect. Correct typos and parlance where appropiate. But you seem abled to write "...have been used with various differences in meaning..." without citing any source or reference you make mandatory to me (and others, I suppose). Well, I think we can improve the current edit by rescuing some wording and spirit from my original paragraphs, but please, stop stripping more relevant info in the article. I remember than you stripped away the definition "indirect color" in the Indexed color article only due to *you* were unable to find a source. I repeat: don't delete, add "citation needed". Keep in mind that this article (and the related "Indexed color") has been rewritten from mere stub, it is still 'fresh'. But I have no time enough to devote, so you should see them as in "under construction"-like status. Please discuss first, then edit. I think it is better to exchange opinion rather than start another "war of editions". This time, I won't do the changes by myself. I invite you to do so, or to discuss. But if you'll depart away again from the original intention and/or layout, I'll revert your changes. See you. -Ricardo Cancho Niemietz (talk) 17:32, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

If you feel that I have added something that is suspect, or needs to backed up by sources, please give it a fact tag, or just remove it, or bring it up here; in the particular case you mention above, the different uses follow immediately, and yes I agree they should be sourced. If you disagree with a removal I've made, put it back with a source or other good justification. I'm not unreasonable about these things, and have been trying to explain what's wrong with the items that I've been working on. See WP:BRD for potential strategies. Dicklyon (talk) 22:26, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

I have re-orged the first section after the lead to better support the "either" structure of the lead sentence. I didn't see any meanings there that were not consistent with the lead. And see WP:MOSBOLD. Dicklyon (talk) 22:43, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Current issues:

• By introducing "GUI palettes" section, now the summary fits better with the article's structure; good work, I like it (mainly due to you don't delete this time!).
• I change double-quoting by italics, which also follows WP:MOSBOLD.
• About "TrueColor" vs "Truecolor": once upon a time, many years ago, the spelling TrueColor was used, maybe due to it resembles "True Color" (also HighColor and HiColor) and maybe due it highlights for marketing purposes. Today, among others it is used as a line of monitors from DELL. But I notice that there are actually two articles in Wikipedia named "Truecolor" and "True color", the first related with pixel depth and the second as opposite to "False color" imaging.
• About "Color Look-Up Table" spelling: an acronym CLUT exists. I don't mean that every instance of this expression must be spelled this way. The titlecase form is usually preferred when talking about the harware device and it equals to CLUT (as Random Access Memory=RAM, Central Processing Unit=CPU, etc.), and lowercase form when mere color lookup table is cited, as a simple input-output mapping table. But both uses are common in the both context (although hardware usually prefers the acronym).
• About "Color Look-Up Table" definition: well, I found a handful of "software" uses for color lookup table. I tried to clarify the hardware origin and uses of CLUT, and the adoption of the term in software, giving some sources for some uses. Personally, I always prefer "CLUT" for hw and "palette" for sw, and some reliable cited source too. These kind of term-crossing are partially responsible of the pointed confussion, but I think this time I didn't take party over any use in the article. Suggestions are welcome (I know your preferred in advance: Sources! ;-D).
• "Adaptive" vs "Adaptative": I see, the first is prevalent. But English-speaker people apparently doesn't matter the difference, or the "typo" were corrected time ago.
• You tend to strip HTML separators, but the final result depends on the browser window size and screen resolution. By experience, the separators usually gives better layout for every case by making separation explicit. I use IE6 with a no full screen window about 1000×700 over a 1280×1024 screen, and I prefer the version with separator.
• I put refs for some of your cn (always better this way: you tag, I ref...)
• Surely, I forget something :-), but as we are damned to discussing... (N.B. the word "damned" it is not pejorative intended here). -Ricardo Cancho Niemietz (talk) 13:32, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Just on the issue of "html separators", there are wiki templates which do this, such as {{clear}} and {{clearright}}, but they should generally only be used when there are many images; in this article no such layout breaks are currently needed. --jacobolus (t) 16:24, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Well, I was using just <br style="clear:both" />, simply due to I saw once in an article page and it works well enough. Layout depends on browser, I know, but some solutions are better than others. In my browser, the visual result without separator is bad; maybe an exception or a rule, I don't know. I was working on digital image processing and design as both programmer and designer along 20 years (it was not difficult to imagine! :-), and layout issues catch my eyes. In other hand, I don't know to rate the quality of a page, but even if I knew, it seems to me not a good idea to rate myself. Thanks for the "B". Yours. -Ricardo Cancho Niemietz (talk) 16:38, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Colour Palettes in General

There is no 'colour palette' page, but there 'should 'be. Colour palettes are created in many areas of design & art (the visual arts), not only a computer graphics context. Eg Architecture, Interior design, Jewelry, Product design of many kinds, Animation, Fine art, Illustration, Print, Textiles, Branding & Brand identity, Clothing, Publishing & Magazine design, Graphic design in non-computer contexts inc advertising, Craft, Outsider Art, Graffiti .... Predicting colour palettes is a big area of trend prediction (an industry), and creating colour palettes can be a job role in itself. The term 'colour palette' should not link to here, which is a subtopic. Not sure how to undo it though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_chart is a better re-direct than this page The omission of the 'colour palette' page is a big lack for wikipedia, but typical of wikipedia inconsistency. EE 90.194.24.158 (talk) 12:40, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Palette (computing)/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

Article revisited and rewritten. Do someone to rate it now? I know, it lacks references yet... -Ricardo Cancho Niemietz (talk) 19:01, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Last edited at 19:01, 19 February 2008 (UTC). Substituted at 02:11, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Too-narrow definition

I agree it's not unusual to associate a palette with a CLUT, but it's not universal. See for example this book which says "Palette. The available colors in a colorspace or specific image. In 24-bit RGB images, the palette is the number of colors it is possible to represent, which is 16.7 million. In indexed-color images (such as GIF) the palette is a fixed set of colors written into a CLUT (Color Look-Up Table)." I edited the lead to be a bit more general, but got reverted. Dicklyon (talk) 01:40, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Well, the thing is, this article is about CLUTs. Calling the colors in a colorspace a palette, while it may be acceptable in a loose, informal sense of a palette being a set of colors, technically speaking it is just wrong. For one, RGB 888 is a color format, not a palette. Other uses of the word "palette", while valid, have their place in the other articles mentioned in the hatnote. --uKER (talk) 02:02, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Well, someone made it about CLUTs, but some earlier versions included the more general interpretation of a palette as I described. Check it out. Dicklyon (talk) 04:43, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

The thing is, different definitions of a term are supposed to go into separate articles. That's what disambiguations are for. --uKER (talk) 04:51, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

I'm not talking about a different definition, but about the set of available colors. The other topic, a tool palette, was sensibly moved elsewhere, I think. Even small 3-bit and 4-bit palettes were done without CLUTs, yes? Dicklyon (talk) 05:35, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

I don't know what 3-bit or 4-bit palettes you're talking about, but any time the colors have preassigned numbers without the number being a description of the color's components (be it RGB, CMYK, HSL, YUV, YCbCr or whatever), then it is a CLUT. --uKER (talk) 23:48, 20 June 2020 (UTC)

@Dicklyon: Here are two definitions that sum up pretty much everything: [1][2]. It basically says that CLUT is a kind of data compression approach for image data. A sprite just maps (associates) pixels (R256,G256,B256) into (with) indexes of a single table of colors which is shipped with the sprite and which is loaded into CLUT upon rendering. That's how it works. AXONOV (talk) ⚑ 18:18, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

@UKER and Alexander Davronov: I don't think there's any ambiguity or misunderstanding of what a CLUT is, just whether a palette necessarily is (or involves) a CLUT. Early 3-bit color systems, for example, would drive each of R, G, and B directly from a bit of the 3-bit color code, without any intervening lookup or logic. And 4-bit color systems like the Commodore Vic similarly drove the color bits, possibly with a bit of logic, through a few resistors that controlled phase shifters to make NTSC or PAL color signals; no intervening lookup, just a fixed palette with a structure determined by the color modulation hardware. See this note, which starts with "The C=64 (with its VIC-II chip) features a palette of 16 colors." and derives a CLUT that can be used in emulators, but makes it clear that the VIC-II hardware had a fixed palette and no CLUT. Dicklyon (talk) 19:15, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Also, as I noted at the outset, a 24-bit color system (or a 5+6+5-bit RGB color system, and other variations) has no CLUT still has a palette. Dicklyon (talk) 19:17, 28 August 2022 (UTC)