Tips for how to improve your palletes!

Well, actually, before getting into the pallete making, i'd like to mention that you must be wise on your color choice. Sadly, we cannot put nine thousand colors in one same sprite, so you should try to minimize the amount of colors you use, depending on how big the object you're going to sprite is. Example: avoid this. Try to stick with palletes like the last sprite shown below.

Although... i doubt anyone would make any mistakes between the 1st-3rd sword... But just to be sure!

Many of you already might know this, but this technique called ''Hue shifting'' consists of changing a color into another one, to give it the effect of it getting darker. I'm not very good at explaining things, but here's an image to understand better. The left one is a sprite without hue shifting, and the second one is with hue shifting.

In the left one we can see a normal, bland pallete that for it's shades, only it's brightness and saturation changes. The darkest color is a very dark cyan, and the brightest color is white. However, in the second sprite, we can see how the colors go, from a dark purple-ish blue, to a cyan, and then white. Basically this makes your sprites much more fun to look at!
Oh also, that row of colors is the pallete. All the colors used in the sprite are in there, in a neat order. From the darkest color to the brightest.

Sometimes, our sprite's colors are way too bright and saturated. This might hurt the eyes of people. You might be able to withstand the colors, but others just can't look at it, cause it's painful to. So for this, you can use just some sort of tool to lower the saturation of things. This is especially important if you're working on ''strong'' colors like red or green, as they leave a powerfull impact on our eyes. In this image, we can see the first image is very saturated, the second is more normal, and the third uses a much more pleasant pallete.

To me, the most important trait about pixel art is that it's about perfection using only the most minimal of resources. Most people would normally think that the more colors and shades you use, the better! But no, that's actually a bad thing. The more and more colors you use, the harder it will be to work with. For example, imagine you've done a really pretty sprite, and that was only thanks to the 9 trillion colors and shades you've put on it, however, let's imagine that you for some reason want to edit that sprite later, or maybe to even animate it, well, here comes the problem. Due to the fact that you put so many colors in it, it is near impossible to keep it's shading consistent. It's light source will be all weird, i'm not sure if im explaining myself correctly, but anyway, just avoid using too many colors and shades. It is reccomendable to only use 2 or 3 for small objects, 3-4 for medium ones, and up to 7 for BIG ones. Another bad thing about using too many colors its that it makes it's pixel grid more noticeable, which you want to avoid.

Actually this doesn't look too bad... BUT, that's only on 100%. If we zoom it, it looks horrible.

Now, i know i said hue shifting is good, but that isn't always the case. Im about to show you a iron bar sprite, along with a pallete i came up when i first learned of hue shifting. At that time, i thought that ALL objects must be yellow to make them look brighter, and oh boy, i was blatantly wrong. Some objects don't. Although the sprite itself is really ugly (cause it's old), and it might not be the best example, i'll show it anyway, the main objective here is to make you see that hue shifting isn't always the best idea. The first sprite is my how i thought hue shifting works, the second one is how it should be done.
To be honest, the first one makes it look more like the metal is kind of rusted. Anyways, another example is here.

In this sprite i've had a really tough time with the palletes and shading, since at that point i still thought ''White objects must not use hue shifting, they must remain colorless.'', but then i tried adding just a tiny bit of blue to make darker colors, and boom, there we go. Super awesome machine gun. Although the second biggest problem in that sprite was the way of shading, so i went for a more metal-slug styled theme, and everything was solved. I might explain more about this in another ocassion, but in this tutorial we're learning about palletes.

Well, that's it. I've pretty much explained the basics, now, you're good to go. However, if you still want more, i have a few tips... They're not neccesary to learn, because these tips are more about me explaining how i work, but you, who haves a different art style and work methods, will probably not benefit much on this. But in case you're still interested, here i go!

[SPOILER="Orb-shaped palletes"]
This is probably the most useful trick i've learned. In fact, i came up with it entirely on my own! This technique consists on making your palletes take the shape of spheres/orbs/circles instead of that rectangular slider pallete. I probably am not explaining this properly, but in this image you will understand what i mean.

The object in the top is what i call ''The slider pallete'', and the bottom one i call it the ''Orb pallete'' (this is just how i personally name them though :P). All you do here is instead of a slider, you make a shaded orb using your pallete. That's it. Now you're probably wondering, what the hell is the use in this? The use on the orb palletes is incredibly big, as it lets you see many, many mistakes you could've made with just using the slider pallete. For example, in this image, i show you a pallete i've made before i came up with the orb pallete idea, and next to that pallete, another pallete i came up after inventing the orb pallete trick.