What is pebble-color-optimizer?

Pebble Photo Optimizer is a browser based tool that helps developers and designers prepare regular photos and images so they look right on a Pebble Time smartwatch screen. These watches display images using only a small set of 64 colors, and the screen itself is an e paper display, similar to an e reader, whose contrast and brightness change depending on the light around it. A photo that looks fine on a computer monitor can turn muddy or lose detail once shown on the actual watch in bright sunlight or dim rooms. Regular tools that shrink an image down to a limited color palette usually just do straightforward math to find the closest matching colors, which does not account for how the real e paper screen behaves under different lighting. This tool instead simulates how the watch's hardware displays colors under several real world lighting conditions, and works backward from that simulation to pick the actual Pebble color codes that will look correct once shown on the device. The tool lets you preview your image side by side under three lighting conditions: direct sunlight, a normally lit room, and with the watch's backlight turned on, so you can judge how it will really look before exporting anything. Before the color count is reduced, you can adjust brightness and contrast so that shadows and bright highlights do not blend together into solid, unreadable blocks. You can also choose between different dithering methods, which are techniques for blending a small number of colors together to fake smoother gradients, including a method called Atkinson Dithering and a simple checkerboard pattern mix. Using the tool is a straightforward five step process: upload your source image, choose which lighting condition matters most to you, pick a dithering style, adjust brightness and contrast while watching the live previews update, and then export the final image by saving it from the results area for use in your own Pebble smartwatch app project. The tool runs entirely in the browser and is also hosted online so it can be tried without installing anything.