Pixel-art is a palette-limited image that uses strictly specific colors, and those colors can be easily swapped in the editor. But what about doing it at runtime without a need to re-edit them? For example on sprites to make them appear belonging to a specific team. That technology was used for a long time, but with modern pixel-art games using PNGs, it became harder to do so, since those are not indexed colors.
Working with various people I've seen that it's often done in an inefficient way of just preparing copy of exact same sprite just to change the colors, or make limited version of palette swap by recoloring only a specific color (like magenta) at runtime. But what if we could just use a simple lookup table and swap any color we want during the rendering for a fairly cheap price? That is the why this a thing now.
Let's start what we have. Usually people use 8-bit images, meaning that there's 8 bits per the primary c