limit color palette

[Todd Kopriva]

I’d try the Colorama effect with Interpolate Palette turned off.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
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[Hannes Paulsson]

Can you keep your original colors with colorama?

Another thing you could try is to apply the “posterize” effect.

[Chris Wright]

easy, make an adjustment layer and put in these 2 bundled effects

effect-channel-arithmetic
operator slice
r 60
g 60
b 60
—–
effect-stylize-mosaic
170 horiz
170 vert
sharp colors->on

this makes perfect 8 bit nes pictures, and if you want forced color dithering, exporting out a GIF with dithering on makes nice banding spots.

https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/

[Marcus Eckert]

well, the colorama effect is probably closest but I’ll probably end up recreating the scene in paint or something, it’s just clean enough otherwise and doesn’t look true 8-bit. thanks though!

[Andy Engelkemier]

I know this is really old, but I found it by doing something really similar and came up with results that I think are better. And order matters of course.

Posterize is likely what you want, but not by itself. You’ll need to limit the colors to probably 8 values of R, G and B. So precomp your layer and duplicate it 3 times. Make each layer only show Red, Green, and Blue. I used levels(individual controls) because that’s what I thought of first, but there are several solutions there and I’m not sure which is the fastest. Be sure that you are limiting the at both the beginning And the end (just before the last posterize 8) of the stack just in case you added some colors in some effects in the middle. Change the top two layers to add mode. Your image should look like it did before.

Now add posterize to each layer and change the value to 8. Yeah, that doesn’t look super great. So now for the dithering! Add noise above the posterize on each layer. Probably around 1%.

I’ve found better dithering results by sequentially adding those. So maybe start by adding posterize 200, noise, posterize 128, noise, posterize 64, noise, posterize 32, noise, then Finally your posterize 8. You can also experiment with checking color noise on some/all of the noise. You’re only using one channel for each layer so using color noise is going to just make the noise values a bit more subtle.

And if you want to change the visual resolution add an adjustment layer and add mosaic to it and adjust to whatever resolution you’re after.

This technique also appears to work well for getting rid of banding when your adjustments cause banding in 8bit color, which is what most every video output is going to be, and even if you’re using 10/12bit the majority of people viewing it will end up on an 8bit viewer of some sort.