I'm not sure how I would go about reducing the color palette of a PIL Image. I would like to reduce an image's palette to the 5 prominent colors found in that image. My overall goal is to do some basic color sampling.
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That's easy, just use the undocumented colors argument:
result = image.convert('P', palette=Image.ADAPTIVE, colors=5)
I'm using Image.ADAPTIVE to avoid dithering
Nadia Alramli
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Thank you, that's wonderful. I've always hated the PIL documentation. How do you then convert it back? With `image.convert("RGB", palette=Image.ADAPTIVE, colors=5)` or something else? – Cosine Jan 12 '14 at 18:10
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1This is now documented under [im.quantize](http://effbot.org/imagingbook/image.htm). – unutbu Feb 06 '14 at 21:47
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3@unutbu, `im.quantize` is deprecated. – c0dehunter Oct 28 '15 at 11:07
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How can I specify a set of target colors to use for the color reduction? – bonobo Apr 09 '23 at 07:11
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I assume you want to do something more sophisticated than posterize. "Sampling" as you say, will take some finesse, as the 5 most common colors in the image are likely to be similar to one another. Maybe take a look at the 5 most separated peaks in a histogram.
Jonathan Root
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Paul
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The short answer is to use the Image.quantize method. For more info, see: How do I convert any image to a 4-color paletted image using the Python Imaging Library ?
