Cryptocartographer

I have this new obsession with purity in my NES pixel art. Like, I want all my pixel art to only contain the color assignments that existed on the original NES. Fortunately I have a handy reference that I designed. Taking it to the next step, as you can see from the bottom of that link, I made a palette for GIMP so I could make all my pictures have that authentic NES sheen. Ultimately what I would like to do is to make a filter or a script that automatically does the process, but I don’t know how to script in Python for GIMP so I have to make my photos manually, which isn’t even hard anyway. Here’s how you do it, like an artiste. First, find a picture and Image —>Scale Image down to, oh, I dunno, 260 pixels or so? Smaller if the source image is smaller than 3000 px wide (which mine usually are since they’re in RAW). Doing it by percentage would be better. Scale it to 8.6%. The 260 pixels is something I use because that’s the NES’s original resolution for width and when the photos are very large, it pixels them up real nice like. After you’ve shrank it down, go ahead and Image —>Scale Image again, but this time make it mad huge, like 800% and make sure the Interpolation pull-down menu under “Quality” is set to “None.” This will blow it up, pixels and all, making it look mad chunky and delicious. Assuming you loaded the NES palette into your palettes, which I’m sure you did already, you then go Image —>Mode —>Indexed. Then choose “custom palette” and select the NES one. Click “convert” and it makes your chunky photo into an NES cream dream. Here’s an example of a photo of Shigero Miyamoto rendered in glorious NES style.