How to create 256-color images from photos?
I'm trying to do a graphic with a number of people cut out of photos I've taken. I want the product to appear much like old, late 80's/early 90's 256-color games looked like. It's easy enough to pixelate and even try to limit the number of colors onscreen in Photoshop, but, at a pixel level, Photoshop creates a gradient between two distinct colors. Is there a way to limit the number of colors used in an image to just a select few?
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Dunno if this will give you the quality (or lack of it) you want, but if you open an image in Microsoft Paint, you can "Save as" a 256-color photo. Paint will ask you if you want to proceed (it will lose color information), and if you click yes, it'll go ahead and convert the image to 256-color. I don't know how Paint goes about "down-converting" the image to 256-color, so it may or may not give you the result you want.
If you are using Photoshop, change to Indexed color mode (Image > Color Mode > Indexed). These type of images have at most 256 colors, though it is possible to reduce it down to as few as 2. I forget, but you might also be able to choose which particular colors (or palette thereof) are used for conversion.
Another simple way is to save the image as GIF, which is an indexed color format. PNG has a similar capability, but only if you save in an 8-bit format (not its usual 24- or 32-bit).
The Posterize adjustment does something similar, but keeps the image in the same color mode.
Photo Shop. It's harder to use, it is more expensive, the learning curve is steeper, but you can do 200 things in Photo Shop and 20 in Picnik. No professional uses anything else.
Save it as a GIF.