Palettes can be specified in one of two ways: A block of data directly stored in the flame Xml or as an index into a palette file.

Directly stored

The first is the most commonly used and is preferred. The palette is embedded directly in the Xml as either individual tags for each color entry, or as a hexadecimal representation of the binary data. The latter is preferred because it keeps the Xml files smaller.

Index

A less commonly used method from older flames is to specify the palette as an index into a palette file. The file is the standard flam3-palettes.xml which contains 700 palettes and is shipped with all fractal flame editors. The flame has an Xml field named palette whose value is an integer index into the file. A value of -1 means to select a random palette from the file. The palettes in the file are stored as RGB values in the range of 0-255.

Regardless of the format the palette was stored in, the color values are internally stored in a normalized range of 0-1 when read from disk.