One of the most requested and longest awaited features is finally here:

You can now link to the palette you used on an art piece.

Yes you could manually do it with a text link in the description before, but this goes much deeper. 

When you submit a gallery piece now, the submission form will automatically scan it's colors and match it against all palettes on Lospec. If any matches are found, it will show them to you, and you can link it with a single click. The palette will then show under the "specs" list on the gallery page, with a link back to the palette.

If your colors didn't match any palettes exactly, but found some with very similar colors, it will list those too, in case you just did an oopsie and skronkled them up slightly. It will then let you force the colors to conform the palette so they match the hex codes exactly. This ensures any piece that links to a palette uses it exactly. When you do this conversion there will be a popup showing you the before and after so you can ensure the result looks as it should.

This system does not apply to all categories, for example the "Enhanced Pixel Art" or "Voxel Render" categories, where you may have used a palette, but the resulting image contains more colors. For these you can simply search for the palette you used and select it. The specs section will then put a little dippalidoo saying the palette is unrestricted, meaning it's not exactly the same colors in the image, and it was chosen by the artist.

I attempted to auto-match existing gallery pieces to palettes so it wouldn't only be new pieces utilizing this feature. About 20% of the existing 17k gallery pieces were given a palette. Some of these may be wrong, and some pieces might have been missed, but this is a good start. Pieces that require conversion to match the palette were not touched, as that's a decision that should be made by the artist, not me.

If your old piece was missed or mismatched, you can easily link a palette by editing the submission. Palettes will be automatically shown under the palette section just like with new submissions, and you can link/convert them the same way. 

Unsurprisingly, the most commonly used palettes were apollo, dawnbringer-32, pico-8, resurrect-64, aap-64, slso8, endesga-64, lost-century, endesga-32, and oil-6.

This feature utilizes another feature released in a recent update, the Palette Identifier to match palettes. This was a big update with a lot of moving parts so I broke it into a few pieces. And there are more to come.

Now that palettes can be directly linked to palettes, we'll be able to see a collection of art pieces that each palette was used for. This will be utilized by the long awaited Palette List v2 update. Aside from just searching for the most utilized palettes, this will also allow us to begin automatically creating palette example blocks from gallery images, and can eventually retire the submission of 464x120 palette example images, which has angered many and resulted in several extremist antilospecular cults. 

So get out there and start submitting some beautiful palette-linked art!

You may have noticed the feedback page has been a bit dead for while. Even things that had been completed were still sitting as planned. There was a reason.

For a while we used the service Canny.io for a feedback page on the site. It worked very well and was a great tool, that let us embed it on our page, link users, trigger notifications, link to code, all for free. Then a few months ago they changed the free tier to no longer include many of the features. I was locked out of using it until I removed many of the features, or decided to upgrade to $80 a month (a huge chunk of Lospec's budget). 

So instead I created our own simpler system, since most of what we needed already existed on our system. It doesn't have quite as many features as Canny, but at least it's free and fully integrated into Lospec, and now we can start using it again.

So go check it out, and help me decide what to work on or fix by submitting suggestions and voting on ideas. 

This has been a long requested feature, and it's finally here! This lets you follow any artist on Lospec, which means you'll be notified when they post a new piece to the gallery, or submit a new palette. This is a great way to ensure you never miss a piece from your favorite artists! 

Go to an artists profile, and you'll see a new "+ Follow" button on the top right. When you click it, it will turn red and say "Following". You will then start recieving notifications of their new works!

Notifications are sent when the pieces are released from the moderation queue (not as soon as they are submitted or approved). 

When someone starts following you, you'll recieve a notification. You can see someone's total number of followers in the row under their name on their profile, but it's intentionally subtle. 

Go try it out!

The new Palette Identifier tool lets you upload an image you've created and find which Lospec palette it used! It searches every palette on Lospec that uses the same colors in your image. It will still return matches if you only used a subset of colors from your palette. It will even work if your palette has been modified slightly, returning the palettes that are the most similar. 

This tools works via magic. No further questions please.

It's also used in the palette queue for pending palettes, so moderators can easily spot when your submission already exists on Lospec, and send a bomber drone to your house to destroy you (also available upon request).

Our popular Pixel Art Scaler tool has been upgraded so that it works purely in your client, so it no longer has to go to our server. Not only will this be faster for you, it will also reduce the strain on our server so everything else will process faster. The UI should now also be a little easier to use. If you don't like this change, the older version is still available.

Theres also a new feature where you can pick from various pixel art scaling algorithms for upscaling your art. None of these are perfect, and wont be as good as scaling things up by hand, but they can be interesting to see, and might be a good starting point for other things. 

In addition there's also a new tool called the Pixel Art Rotator, which is very similar, just for rotation instead of scaling. This uses algorithms that work better than just typical pixel rotation, which can have very noisy and messy results.

If you find any issues with these tool, or know of any algorithms we missed that you would like to see, please let us know.