How can I extract the palette from a 5-6-5 bitmap image?

Question

I am trying to extract the palette from a 5-6-5 (16bit) bitmap image that I have produced using ImageConverter Plus from an original Photoshop file. I need to read out the palette and compare it to the palette I have elsewhere for another image.

Is there a piece of freeware (or not) software that can do this? I can read palette files in .pal and .act format with another piece of software, but I would like to generate one of these files from the bitmap in the first place!

Thanks,

George

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To add further information:

I start with an 8-bit PNG in Photoshop which uses a pre-defined colour palette which I have already created. This has a maximum of 256 colours in it, and I save this out as a PNG file. I then convert this to a 5-6-5 bitmap in ImageConverter Plus which will scale the R G B values of each colour since in the 8-bit PNG they are defined in terms of 0-255, but obviously in the 5-6-5 bitmap they are defined in 0-31, 0-63, 0-31.

What I want to now do is inspect the values of the 5-6-5 bitmap and basically re-extract a colour palette from it. You can't do this in photoshop as when you open the file again the colours are automatically converted to the 0-255 range. So really, what image program can I use to look at the 0-31 etc... values in my new BMP.

I should explain that the final image is not for display on a PC screen and I appreciate the process is somewhat convulted but that is how it has to be!

Answer 1

There is no palette there, there are 65536 colors possible, but no palette. So, if you convert it to 24-bit image, colors would be the same.

So if you can extract palette from 24-bit image, you are done :-)