4-bit color

Hi - we have recently been tasked with designing a UI for a product and the color depth is limited to 4-bits per channel, or 4,096 colors total. Since Photoshop does not support 4-bit natively, does anyone know of a workaround, plugin, or 3rd party app that we could use to effectively communicate our color selections to the build team? (No, indexed color won't cut it at only a 256 color palette)

thanks!
..w

OR...even easier perhaps, could someone walk me through creating a custom 4,096 color palette (factors of 16, I believe?)

Image > Mode > Indexed Color has the capability of doing what you are asking. Perhaps googling for a table that can be loaded so that you don't have to define all 4096 colrs?

If you need dither (i.e. Posterise doesn't cut it), I have plugins <http://telegraphics.com.au/sw/#12bits> for this exact solution (see: 12bits).

Thanks for the input guys; we are still learning from our programmer about how to structure our color palette. Rather than going for a full 4,096 color palette, apparently what's most important is to have the R,G,+B values be multiples of 16 to coincide with what the chip can output.

So, for now, we're doing it all manually in Imageready's indexed/optimized mode. cheers + thanks again,
..w