Palettes › Commodore 64

Commodore 64 Colour Palette

Sixteen warm, characterful colours. This page lists every colour in the Commodore 64 palette used by the 8-bit photo converter, with hex and RGB values, explains where the palette came from and how the tool maps a photo onto it, and shows what it does to a real image.

Published 5 September 2026

Machine

Commodore 64

Released

1982

Screen

320 × 200 (hi-res) or 160 × 200 (multicolour)

Colours

16, fixed

Mapping in the converter

Nearest colour by RGB distance

The best-selling home computer, and its odd palette

The Commodore 64 sold in numbers that no other single model of home computer has matched, and for a lot of people it was the first machine they ever programmed. Its graphics came from a chip called the VIC-II, which offered 16 colours chosen by its designer to look decent on the televisions of 1982. The result is a palette with real personality: a dusty red, a warm brown, an orange, a soft pink, three greys and that unmistakable pale blue that filled the screen the moment you switched the machine on.

Like the NES, the C64 produced its colours as a video signal rather than as RGB, and it is notoriously hard to say exactly what the "right" values are. Every emulator and every C64 fan has a slightly different set. The values on this page are the widely used ones from the C64 Wiki, which is the set the converter uses. They are a little more saturated than the picture on a real CRT, but they are what most people recognise as C64 colours.

The colours

The names and order are the official ones from the C64 manual, numbered 0 to 15. Notice how much of the palette is given over to greys and muted tones compared with the ZX Spectrum. That is what makes the C64 palette feel warm and gentle rather than loud.

How the real machine used them

The C64 had two main graphics modes. In hi-res mode at 320 × 200, each 8 × 8 cell could show two colours, much like the Spectrum. In multicolour mode the resolution dropped to 160 × 200 with wide pixels, but each 4 × 8 cell could show four colours, three of them chosen freely. Most games used multicolour mode, which is why classic C64 graphics have those distinctive double-width pixels. Artists used the three greys and the light and dark pairs of blue, green and red to fake smooth shading within the four-colour limit.

The converter applies the palette without those cell limits, so any block can be any colour. If you want the double-width look, run your result through the tool again at a larger pixel size, or crop to a 160-block width and stretch the export horizontally afterwards.

How the converter maps a photo to it

Each block takes the nearest of the 16 colours by RGB distance. One thing to be aware of: because the palette has three neutral greys, any colour that is not fairly saturated tends to be pulled towards grey. A dusky purple sky, a pale blue haze or a muted green field can all come out as grey blocks, which looks odd on a landscape but is actually very true to how C64 art handled subtle colour.

You can see exactly that in the test scene. The upper sky, a blue-purple gradient in the source, becomes a flat mid-grey, while the orange band near the horizon survives and the hills go dark grey. The spheres, on the other hand, look wonderful: each one gets a light and a dark version of its own colour, with the greys doing the shadows.

Which photos suit it

• Portraits and skin. The orange, light red, brown and greys map skin tones better than any other palette here except PICO-8.
• Interiors and everyday scenes. Wood, brick, fabric and warm lamplight all have somewhere to land.
• Anything you want to feel cosy rather than electric.

It is weaker on clear blue skies and vivid greens, which often go grey or flat. If a landscape is the subject, NES keeps more of it.

Tips for better results

• Boost the saturation of skies and foliage a touch before converting, so they stay colourful instead of dropping into the greys.
• Slightly warming the whole photo suits this palette. It was built for warm colours.
• For an authentic C64 loading-screen feel, aim for about 160 blocks across and a pixel size that gives a chunky, horizontal look.