Pixel art tips for colouring: outlining and dithering?

[Ivo]

I was interested in reading the tips in this page but someone I'm getting endless redirects:
http://2dwillneverdie.com/tutorials/
Anyone knows what is up with that?

Anyway I know some people in these forums are into that so maybe someone can help me.

I decided to try to do the following in pixel art: I want to colour a greyscale sketch of a real life object to try to reflect the real colours of the object as seen in photos or whatever.
I want to restrict myself to very few shades of colours to some 2 (or 3) shades of a few colours.

Think for example of a red apple with green leaves: I would like to use 2 or 3 red shades and 2 green shades.

So I guess what I need to do is dither a bit and outline. I could outline the object with black, but perhaps to avoid it to look too cartoony it is best to use the darkest shade of each colour for the outlines and features, or decide where the gradients are and dither with 5 patterns: the 2 solids (no dither), the standard "chess-board" 50% dither, and 2 patterns that are closer to one shade than the other (like a pattern of 1 pixel of the subdominant shade surrounded by 8 pixels with 8 pixels of the other shade). So I could make a transition from a solid to the other solid with 3 intermediate zones.

Thoughts, tips from any of the experts?

Ivo.

[Anapan]

It sounds like what you're looking to do is posterize the image. It's a graphics filter that reduces the colors to the most important ones. What I'd do is create a palette with only the few colors I wanted, then apply it to the image, and touch up the details manually using the original as a reference. Most decent graphic programs also have many options for reducing the image's color including several dithering methods. I use Paint Shop Pro myself, just because it's what I'm used to, but you might want to look into this program:
http://code.google.com/p/grafx2/
I know a lot of pixel artists swear by Gimp as well.
Check out the Pixel Joint and Pixelation boards for some good tutorials etc.

'course you could always use a Gameboy Camera, transfer the image to PC, and shade the object afterward