Palette Generator..

[dognose]

Does anybody know how the various palette generators work?

Example:
http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/img/colors-sample.jpg

Do they just look at the primarily used colors? How can you find which colors are used most?

[anthony]

Most pallettes are bad. basically because they are restricted to small a number of colors.

Typical choices are just a linear 'posterization' which IM can provide.
Another method not implemented is to skew the posterization basied on a gamma function.
See my notes in IM Examples, Quantization, Generating Color Maps
http://imagemagick.org/Usage/quantize/#map_colormaps

For auto-generation of 'best' colormaps. see the rest of that same page. The whole process is called Quantization. The application of a colormap to an image is called Dithering, or threshold mapping, which that page also deals with.