Civrules said:Don't yet know how to use it (although it works now), so I guess I'll just get the others, along with any updates that might come in the future.
M'kay, there are five "control" colors grouped together to the left of the Load, Save, and Done buttons. If you hover your mouse over them, then tooltip text comes up to identify them. Once you've loaded a palette in - and, if I'm not mistaken, the program should force you to do this the first time you run it - it loads up on the screen, and those five control colors get set. The one on the far left is the left bound - normally white or close to it, this is used for the light band of the main color. The one on the far right is the right bound, and does the same thing for the dark band of the main color. Neither bound is actually used in the palette, but they are used for calculating the gradation of the main band. The left middle box is the primary color - index 7, the basis for everything else except the left and right bound, and by default about halfway between the left and right bound. The right middle box is the secondary color - index 7, and by default a couple steps between the primary color and the right bound. This color is used a lot for high-contrast details on units, like the crest on the Hoplite unit, or folds along the worker's cloak. The bottom box is the city-band color, used for shading some mid-range colors and determining the border and unit disc colors, and by default it's just a step up from the primary color. Left-clicking on any of the boxes will let you change that color, and the display immediately update. Right-clicking on a box will set that color to its default value.
The city-band color is the trickiest to work with - set it to something funky, and your units can end up looking very streaky. On the other hand, giving this a nice bright contrasting color is the quickest way to get a sparkly effect. The left and right bounds look cleanest when you use appropriate shades of gray or the main colors, but you can experiment and get other neat effects. For example, try setting the left bound to gold, the primary color to cyan, the right bound to dark blue, and defaulting the secondary color, and city-band color to gold. This should give you an interesting Egyptian-like color mix.
Finally, you can and should test these colors on the fly. Start up a game, with debug mode on if you want to add units to test, and you can load up a palette, save it, then save and reload the game to see the effect immediately. Doing something like this, it shouldn't take you more than 5 minutes to set and tweak each new color set.
Oh, yeah, that last color box all by itself on the lower left controls the background of the screen. It's basically just there if you want to see how the palette looks against a different background color.