# I want to turn a photo into a 16-bit video game style image



## jdramirez (Mar 2, 2017)

I record and edit my daughter's rec league basketball games. I'm moderately competent with Adobe premiere, and I had a bit of inspiration recently. 

I'm going to edit in the intro of Nba jam and pepper the gameplay with boom shackalakas, he's heating up, and other audio snippets the game is known for.

but... in the selection screen, I want to edit in images of the girls... And sure it could be photo realistic and they won't care, but I really want to down convert the images to be somewhat reflective of the 16 bit imagery used by the game.

I have Photoshop (elements), I'm marginally competent enough to follow directions. if you are better at Google than I am and know of a tutorial... I would be most appreciative.


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## ajfotofilmagem (Mar 2, 2017)

You mean 16 colors, like you did in the old video games in the 80's?


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## privatebydesign (Mar 2, 2017)

Open image.

Down sample to suitable figure, around 200 px x 200px. Go Image-Mode-Indexed Color change 'Colors" to a much lower number to taste depending on subject, 8-30 ish range.

P.S. If the image is a 16bit image you need to convert it to an 8bit image first for Index Color to be available.


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## jdramirez (Mar 2, 2017)

8 bit v 16 v 64... honestly... I don't know what the bits relationship with the color palette is... But when I get home... I'll take a screen grab and show y'all roughly what my end goal is. 




ajfotofilmagem said:


> You mean 16 colors, like you did in the old video games in the 80's?


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## jdramirez (Mar 2, 2017)

awesome. I'll give it a go... 



privatebydesign said:


> Open image.
> 
> Down sample to suitable figure, around 200 px x 200px. Go Image-Mode-Indexed Color change 'Colors" to a much lower number to taste depending on subject, 8-30 ish range.
> 
> P.S. If the image is a 16bit image you need to convert it to an 8bit image first for Index Color to be available.


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## jdramirez (Mar 3, 2017)

I got close... 35 colors seemed to be the sweet spot... But then going from what was on the screen to saving as a jpg, it was smoothed out due to the compression... so I have to figure out how to keep that blocky pixelated look...

thanks for your help though...


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## midluk (Mar 9, 2017)

Try to save it as PNG (in 256 colors mode). With such a low number of different colors, the image will likely even be smaller when losslessly compressed with png than it is with lossy jpeg.
In general, when every pixel counts and there are hard edges and small structures in the image, png is much better suited than jpeg.


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## LonelyBoy (Mar 9, 2017)

midluk said:


> Try to save it as PNG (in 256 colors mode). With such a low number of different colors, the image will likely even be smaller when losslessly compressed with png than it is with lossy jpeg.
> In general, when every pixel counts and there are hard edges and small structures in the image, png is much better suited than jpeg.



This. Also, at the resolution we're talking about, even PNG will result in a plenty small filesize. It's not like even lossless compression of a 5DSr.

Heck, even a 200x200 BMP won't be that big. It's more or less a jumbo icon.


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## jdramirez (Mar 9, 2017)

The project is done... and I probably went with too few colors because it looked like I tried to create a sepia tone... but I was happy enough with it. 

Also... I saved it as a photoshop file, psd, so I didn't have any of that .jpg compression smoothing that I was complaining about.

Thanks for ya'll's help.


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