gradient/palette question

[Chris Northcross]

I'm a little lost on how studio artist analyzes source images to create gradients and palettes.

 

I have the following image that I wanted to use to create a gradient:

 

 

I was expecting a gradient that would be filled with all of the colors found in the flag and that those colors would span the entire length of the gradient.  Instead the gradient that was generated looked like this:

 

My question is twofold: what's going on and how can generate (procedurally) a gradient that looks like the picture above.?

 

As for how I generated the above gradient,

1. loaded the rainbow flag as the source image

2. went to edit->gradient->generate from->source image

[Synthetik]

The algorithm generates a palette with 48 colors in it and then generates the gradient from all 48 colors. It's going to pick up color variants at the anti-liased edges in the source, and if it can't make it to fill in 48 different colors in the original palette conversion then those come out as black. That's the technical explanation about why it currently ends up the way it does, i understand why you would not want it to come out that way. The algorithm used is really designed for complex realworld images as opposed to artificial images with just a few blocks of color.

 

What i would suggest doing is creating your palette manually. Use c hotkey clicks to select the colors 1 by one, then option click at the appropriate place in the color gradient editor in the source area to insert the colors. Here's one i threw together quickly manually.

It's best to get the 2 end colors recorded first,then insert the interior ones.

We used to have some edit commands in MSG Evolver that let you build color gradients from the source color memories. I should put those back, along with generate from the first X color palette colors. That would make it easy to generate equal spaced color gradients from a fixed small set of colors.

 

Allowing for arbitrary numbers of colors in auto-gnerated color palettes and the source color palette in general is a feature i've wanted to add for awhile now. It always chooses 48 right now, which is useful for natural images, but in many MSG situations you might want something more limited. And it would deal with your particular problem as well.