Create Paletted CGImageRef

Question

I'm trying to create a paletted (indexed) PNG using CoreGraphics.

The best I've found is that I can use:

CGColorSpaceRef colorSpace = CGColorSpaceCreateIndexed(CGImageGetColorSpace(maskedImage), 255, <#const unsigned char *colorTable#>);

Then:

CGImageRef palettedImage = CGImageCreateCopyWithColorSpace(maskedImage, colorSpace)

However I'm not sure what to put as the colorTable. I'd like to leverage some pre-made (fast) quantization algorithm - such as the one that is already built in to ImageIO when calling CGImageDestinationCreateWithURL(url, kUTTypeGIF , 1, NULL);

How do I create a palette for the PNG?

Answer 1

So the final solution was to do something like this:

// Create an 8-bit palette for the bitmap via libimagequant (http://pngquant.org/lib)
liq_attr *liqAttr = liq_attr_create();
liq_image *liqImage = liq_image_create_rgba(liqAttr, bitmap, (int)width, (int)height, 0);
liq_result *liqRes = liq_quantize_image(liqAttr, liqImage);

liq_write_remapped_image(liqRes, liqImage, bitmap, bytesPerRow * height);
const liq_palette *liqPal = liq_get_palette(liqRes);

// Transpose the result into an rgba array
unsigned char colorTable[1024];
for (NSInteger n = 0; n < liqPal->count; n++) {
    colorTable[4 * n] = liqPal->entries[n].r;
    colorTable[4 * n + 1] = liqPal->entries[n].g;
    colorTable[4 * n + 2] = liqPal->entries[n].b;
    colorTable[4 * n + 3] = liqPal->entries[n].a;
}

// Release
liq_attr_destroy(liqAttr);
liq_image_destroy(liqImage);
liq_result_destroy(liqRes);

My hope was to use the color table to create a CGContextRef. However, according to this article: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#qa/qa1037/_index.html that isn't possible in any case.