Visions Of Chaos Tutorial 5 - Color Palettes

Color palettes are one of the most important features in creating nice looking images. This tutorial will help you become comfortable with making your own color palettes using Visions Of Chaos. Note that the example colors here are purposely gawdy to show the effects. Once you learn and experiment with these features you will be making your own palettes in no time with ease.

Opening the Color Palette Editor

Select "Color Palette Editor" from the Utilities menu. You will see the following dialog appear. The various tabs will be explained in the followind tutorial sections.

"Specific Blends" tab

This area of the color palette editor allows you to easily create a palette that blends between 2 colors. Clicking the squares in the Color One and Color Two areas with bring up the standard Windows color dialog and allow you to select a different color.

For this example, change Color One to a blue color and Color Two to a red color. The dialog should look like the following.

clicking the "Standard blend color 1 to color 2" will create a color palette with a smooth range of shades in between the selected colors.

clicking the "Line blend color 1 to color 2" will create a color palette with a smooth range of shades in between the selected colors, but will leave every second palette entry black.

And finally, clicking the "Stripe color 1 and color 2" creates a palette with colors that alternate between the selected 2 colors.

"Auto Blend" tab

The Auto Blend area is a much more flexible way of creating palettes. You can see a range of squares numbered 1 to 16. Clicking on them will bring up the Windows color dialog and allow you to select or change the colors. For this example, change the first 3 squares to red, green and blue. The dialog should look like the following.

As with the "Standard Blend" tab, there are a number of blend functions to select from. The difference here is that you will be asked for the number of colors to blend. Click on "Auto-blend x colors" and type 3. You will then see the 3 colors selected blended smoothly.

Try the other blend functions and try using more than 3 colors.

"Other Effects" tab

This really should be titled "Other Effect" as there is only the one effect at this stage. The Shift RGB button swaps the red green and blue color components of the palette. Not too exciting, but can lead to a pleasing new palette scheme.

"Custom Blend" tab

The custom blend allows you to insert color palette colors in a different way. Some people find this easier and more precise than using the blending tabs.

Change the color square to a yellow color. Make sure the "Click Mode" is set to "Add Color" and click the mouse within the "Preview of palette" area to add the color.

Using the same steps, add a purple and green color to get a display like the following.

The white lines in the preview palette are showing the points the added colors blend at. Say for example, you think there is too much yellow shading in the palette. Change the Click Mode to Move Color. You can then click and drag the purple line up closer to the yellow color line. Getting the mouse pointer tip exactly over the line is not easy at first.

Any of the colors can also be removed. For example, we no longer want the yellow color. Change the Click Mode to Remove Color and click on the yellow color line.

Once you are happy with the palette, clicking the Apply button will change the current palette to the edited palette.

"SIN Blend" tab

The SIN Blend tab creates blended palettes by using SIN functions for the red green and blue components of the color palette. The sinpal01.map etc sample palettes that come with Visions Of Chaos were made with this function. The easiest way to use it is to keep clicking the Random button until you get a palette that you like the look of.

End Of Tutorial 5

Now that you should feel more confident experimenting with the color palette editor and creating your own unique palettes.