How to recolour sprites in a retro console palette

Why the usual way fails

A sprite with animation has many frames and often several layers, and every one of them has to change in the same way. Swapping colours by hand is easy to get wrong, and one missed pixel shows up as a flicker when the animation plays. Old consoles also had strict colour limits, so a version that looks right needs colours the machine could actually show. Many editors only replace one colour at a time, and shading falls apart when the new palette has a different number of shades. And if you change your mind, undoing dozens of separate edits is its own job.

How Pixel Pak helps

Pixel Pak is a pixel art editor for phone, tablet and PC with a palette swap that works on the whole drawing at once. One click turns every layer and frame into a palette such as Game Boy green, PICO-8, NES, Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum, and the shading is kept. A before-and-after preview shows the result first, and a single undo puts everything back. If you would rather draw within the limits from the start, Retro Mode locks your colours to a real console like the NES, SNES, Game Boy or Master System. You can also take colours from any picture, or import palette files from GIMP, JASC, Paint.NET or Lospec with Pro. Palette swap is in the free version, works offline after install and needs no account. Drawing works with a finger as well as a mouse, so you can do this on a phone too.

Step by step

1. Open your sprite in Pixel Pak, or import it from an Aseprite or Pyxel Edit file.
2. Choose the palette swap and pick a target palette, such as Game Boy or NES.
3. Check the before-and-after preview.
4. Apply it to the whole drawing, every layer and frame.
5. Play the animation to make sure nothing flickers.
6. Save it as a new variant, or undo once to go back.

Tips

• Make enemy variants from one base sprite instead of drawing each one again. A palette swap keeps the shapes identical.
• Use the contrast bar to check that two colours still stand apart after the swap.
• Take a palette from a reference picture when you want a sprite to match an existing scene.
• Turn on colour-blind preview before you finish, so team colours stay readable for everyone.

Questions