A 54-Color Palette
I recently received an e-mail asking if I could run my palette generator to produce a 54-color palette. This is the same number of colors available on the old NES console (though it couldn’t do them all it once) and the person was curious how a palette from my program would compare. I’d always figured that if I ran my program again for a larger palette it would be for either 48 or 64 colors. But sure, I can do 54. Here’s what my program came up with.
First, I should note that I spent way less compute time on this than I did for my previous 16- and 32-color palettes. Those had a quality rating of 2.37 and 2.35, respectively, where the quality is defined as the ratio of the CIE DE 2000 difference between the two closest colors to the root mean squared error between a sampling of the RGB color cube and the closest matching colors in the palette. By comparison, this 54-color palette only measures 2.29.
That said, here are the colors that my program selected. As before, you can download this as a GIMP palette or grab the following image for use with an eye dropper tool in your favorite art program:
| 05fec1 | rgb(2.1%, 99.2%, 75.7%) | bright teal | |
| 32af87 | rgb(19.8%, 68.4%, 53.1%) | green blue | |
| 387261 | rgb(21.9%, 44.7%, 38.2%) | blue green | |
| 000000 | rgb(0.0%, 0.0%, 0.0%) | black | |
| 1c332a | rgb(11.0%, 20.3%, 16.7%) | charcoal | |
| 2a5219 | rgb(16.7%, 32.3%, 10.0%) | navy green | |
| 2d8430 | rgb(17.7%, 51.9%, 18.9%) | tree green | |
| 00b716 | rgb(0.4%, 71.8%, 8.6%) | green | |
| 50fe34 | rgb(31.4%, 99.2%, 20.4%) | poison green | |
| a2d18e | rgb(63.4%, 81.9%, 55.8%) | light grey green | |
| 84926c | rgb(51.9%, 57.4%, 42.5%) | green grey | |
| aabab3 | rgb(66.8%, 73.0%, 70.2%) | silver | |
| cdfff1 | rgb(80.4%, 100.0%, 94.2%) | eggshell blue | |
| 05dcdd | rgb(2.1%, 86.1%, 86.5%) | aqua blue | |
| 499faa | rgb(28.7%, 62.3%, 66.6%) | turquoise blue | |
| 2f6d82 | rgb(18.7%, 42.9%, 51.0%) | sea blue | |
| 3894d7 | rgb(22.3%, 58.0%, 84.2%) | azure | |
| 78cef8 | rgb(47.1%, 80.5%, 97.1%) | lightblue | |
| bbc6ec | rgb(73.4%, 77.4%, 92.4%) | light periwinkle | |
| 8e8cfd | rgb(55.5%, 55.1%, 98.9%) | lavender blue | |
| 1f64f4 | rgb(12.1%, 39.3%, 95.5%) | bright blue | |
| 25477e | rgb(14.7%, 27.9%, 49.4%) | cobalt | |
| 72629f | rgb(44.9%, 38.5%, 62.3%) | dark lavender | |
| a48db5 | rgb(64.1%, 55.4%, 70.8%) | heather | |
| f5b8f4 | rgb(96.1%, 71.9%, 95.3%) | light lavendar | |
| df6ff1 | rgb(87.4%, 43.5%, 94.5%) | light magenta | |
| a831ee | rgb(65.7%, 19.4%, 93.3%) | electric purple | |
| 3610e3 | rgb(21.2%, 6.6%, 88.7%) | strong blue | |
| 241267 | rgb(14.2%, 7.2%, 40.4%) | dark indigo | |
| 7f2387 | rgb(49.8%, 13.9%, 52.8%) | darkish purple | |
| 471a3a | rgb(27.8%, 10.5%, 22.8%) | aubergine | |
| 93274e | rgb(57.5%, 15.3%, 30.5%) | berry | |
| 976877 | rgb(59.3%, 40.7%, 46.6%) | mauve | |
| e57ea3 | rgb(89.7%, 49.4%, 64.0%) | dull pink | |
| d5309d | rgb(83.5%, 18.8%, 61.5%) | purpley pink | |
| dd385a | rgb(86.6%, 21.9%, 35.5%) | pink red | |
| f28071 | rgb(94.5%, 50.3%, 44.3%) | salmon | |
| ee2911 | rgb(93.1%, 16.4%, 6.9%) | tomato red | |
| 9e281f | rgb(61.7%, 15.8%, 12.3%) | brownish red | |
| 4e211a | rgb(30.6%, 13.0%, 10.2%) | chocolate brown | |
| 5b5058 | rgb(35.6%, 31.6%, 34.8%) | purplish brown | |
| 5e4d28 | rgb(37.1%, 30.3%, 15.9%) | mud brown | |
| 7e751a | rgb(49.4%, 45.8%, 10.4%) | ugly brown | |
| a2af22 | rgb(63.6%, 68.4%, 13.5%) | puke green | |
| e0f53f | rgb(87.8%, 96.0%, 24.7%) | sickly yellow | |
| fffbc6 | rgb(100.0%, 98.2%, 77.6%) | egg shell | |
| ffffff | rgb(100.0%, 100.0%, 100.0%) | white | |
| dfb9ba | rgb(87.2%, 72.4%, 72.8%) | pinkish grey | |
| ab8c76 | rgb(67.1%, 54.8%, 46.2%) | pale brown | |
| eec191 | rgb(93.1%, 75.4%, 56.9%) | light peach | |
| c19029 | rgb(75.7%, 56.6%, 16.2%) | ochre | |
| f8cb1a | rgb(97.2%, 79.4%, 10.2%) | golden yellow | |
| ea7924 | rgb(91.7%, 47.5%, 14.3%) | orange | |
| a15e30 | rgb(63.0%, 37.0%, 18.9%) | earth |
Naturally, I also had to create a mapping of it:
