Drag'n drop your source image at the top of the page, in the "drag'n drop an image here" panel
Below the image, you'll fint a "Target Platform" combo box. Choose ST or STe.
Go to the Bitplane Export section at the bottom of the page
Click Save Bitplanes
...and you're done with the Quick Use section, have fun or stay tuned for further details...
The "Image" Section
Drag'n drop your source image at the top of the page, in the "drag'n drop an image here" panel
The 'Target' combo-box allows you to choose your favorite machine
The 'Color' combo-box allows you to choose how the image colors are converted to the Target Platform's palette. Here's the thing: HTML is using 8 bits per component (256 possibilities for R,G,B), while STe has only 4 bits per component, and ST has 3 bits. There are 2 ways to perform the conversion:
- 'Clamp Color' will just cut the least significant bits, resulting in a potentially slightly darker image.
- 'Nearest Color' will reach to the nearest color (brighter or darker) depending on the lower bits.
Then come the cropping params. By default, the full image is used, but you can work on a sub-section.
Then come the mask params. Use these only if you want to generate a mask for your image.
Below, you'll see the converted image (Cropped, using the Target Platform's colour space).
Everything you change in this section will reset the other sections (palette will be rebuilt from the pixels selected by the crop)
The "WorkBench" section
The left part of this section contains your palette:
- Drag'n drop color entries to change their index in the palettte.
- Click on a color to change its RGB values.
- Two buttons allow you to sort the palette by ascending or descending luminosity. Luminosity is calculated using the standard formula: 0.2126 * R + 0.7152 * G + 0.0722 * B
- A button allows you to load a previously saved palette (or from a PNG file)
- The "lock color 0" checkbox makes sure no pixel is assigned palette index 0. Not really useful on Atari ST
The right part of this section contains the image:
- Sliders allow you to play with zoom and color cycling (no consequence on the image, just for editor visualization)
The "Export" section
Bitplanes Export
Click "Save Bitplanes" to save the RAW bitplanes to a file. Palette is not included
Click "Save RGB" to save a 12 bit per pixel image (stored using 16 bits per pixels, so the 4 top bits are empty)
Click "Save Indexes" to export each pix of the image as its 4bit index into the palette (works only for 16 colors or less images, 2indexes saved per byte)
Palette Export
The palette export options are pretty self-explanatory
export as.asm will write the palette as a list of DC.W values in a .asm file.
export as.bin will write the palette as a list of words in a .bin file. If include color count is ticked, the palette will be preceeded by a 16 bit color count.
export as.c will write the palette as an unsigned short C array in a .c file.
