NES "Hybrid" Palette - Striking a Balance Between Composite and RGB

After "accurately" capturing the NES composite video signal and creating a palette, I felt that the resulting image could use some seasoning of sorts.  While I enjoy the FCEUX palette, it can be a little too vibrant with a number of titles in the NES library.  I took the opportunity to create a "Hybrid" palette - an interpolation between my NESCAP and the FCEUX palettes.  The results of this palette give a best of both worlds colors.  Even the purple-ish sky in Super Mario Bros. retains some of it's purple-ish without going too deep into saturated sky blue.  Keep in mind that the color temperature and other settings on your display heavily influence the perceived color as well as the viewer's vision system (eyes and brains!).

If you'd like to try my HYBRID palette, you can download it here.

If you'd like to try my NESCAP palette, you can download it here.

The following images have NESCAP on the left, HYBRID in the middle, and FCEUX on the right.

Creating an "accurate" NES NTSC Color Palette - Revisited

After discussing my NES palette capture pursuits with Brian Parker (RetroUSB) at PRGE 2016 I decided to revisit the sampling process of the paltest palette capture images.  Instead of running multiple median filter passes to normalize the captured image for sampling, it was discussed to try taking an area of pixel values and averaging them.

If you'd like to try my NESCAP palette, you can download it here.

The following is a debug image that plots out the pixels I sampled for the average.  This was useful for ensuring that I wasn't sampling erroneous data and/or sampling unintended colors.

The resulting palette, NESCAP.pal, was within +/- 1% difference, so the original NTSCU.pal still is a valid palette to use, but there's always the nth degree of improvement to be made as seen below!

Creating an "accurate" NES NTSC Color Palette

On the heels of comparing existing color palettes included with the Hi-Def NES and AVS I decided to see if the BMD IP4K could capture composite video from the original NES.  To my surprise, the IP4K does, so the creation of a NTSC palette was imperative.  While the unsaturated palette claims to be an "accurate" palette, I've found that there are a number of color errors in the palette that I surmise are the result of inaccurate capture equipment.  The errors are consistent with lossy color space conversion (green/purple errors).  See below for an illustration of my palette (NTSCU.PAL) compared to the existing capture based palette.

If you'd like to try my NTSCU palette, you can download it here.

Here are some examples of the NTSCU palette in action.