Everyone knows what this means by now, adding colors to a character to make their sprites look nicer and have more palette possibilities. So on with this.Note: You need to be fairly used to editing palettes to do this, so I'll be skipping steps on how to add colors to a palette and such.1- Grab your sprites and decide what colors you want to split. As an example I'll give Ken unique colors for his pants.2- As you can see, Ken's pants use 5 colors. So what I'm gonna do is add 5 new unique colors to the palette, which will serve to replace the red on the pants3- Apply the new palette (.pal, .act, whichever) to all the sprites you'll be editing. You can do this by a batch process or just manually during step 10.4- Now here's where it starts getting tricky. You can do these next steps with any graphics editor that allows script recording, I think, but my favourite for this is Pain Shop Pro series so it's the one I'll be using here. Open the images in it.Notice how the green colors are shown in the palette display on the right.5- Select the whole area of the image (ctrl + A). This is to circumvent an issue with the scripts that there's no point getting into, just select the whole thing.6- Go to File > Script and click Start Recording7- Select the color replacement tool, and set its size to at least double the size of the image. A picture with 320 pixels of width calls for size 640 for instance.8- One by one, select the source and destination colours and replace them. No need to care about doing it properly yet, just replace the relevant colors everywhere in the pic. One click with the color replacer should do it for each as the tool's size is set to huge.9- Save the script you have been recording.You have now successfuly recorded a script that replaces every color you want in a selected area, from here on out it's an easy task and just a matter of patience.10- Close the pic you used to save the process without saving, and start opening every sprite in the set one at a time.11- With the selection tool, start selecting every bit of the area you want to separate colors for. Be careful not to also select parts of those colors that are not meant to be separated.12- And now the rewarding part. With the target area selected, just go to File > Script > Run, and select the one you recorded previously.Everything will be separated in one go.13- Obviously, repeat the last three steps for every sprite.And that's how I do it.Here's a video for the steps involving scripts:DOWNLOAD
PotS said, January 17, 2010, 08:14:40 pmAlso I guess step 0 would be firing up a media player. 8)haha! totally true I recently started to use script rercording for stuff like this, I guess I still have to do that boring part where I have to manually select the section to color by myself, no magic button.
I did the IoriĀ“s colur separation in MS Paint. Much more simple IMO.Anyway, 98% people prefer Photoshop
Hero. said, January 23, 2010, 02:10:04 amAnyway, 98% people prefer PhotoshopAs one of that 98%, I've got a problem. Photoshop doesn't have a handy-dandy color replacement tool, so my macro has consisted of Select Color Range > Select Color > Fill. Problem with that is twofold: one, the Fill command stores the exact pixel that's clicked, and two, even without Contiguous you have to click in the selected area for Fill to work. This means that the macro only works on the fluke that one of the selected pixels is the one spot I clicked when I made the macro.Long story short, unless I can make it so clicking anywhere on the image will Fill the selected area with color no matter where it is, this tutorial doesn't work with Photoshop. In the meantime I'm proceeding manually, but it's tough work that I don't see dragging past the finish line. I've done standing, walking, crouching, jumping, turning, crushed guard, and missing a throw; all up 80 out of around 470, not including the claw sprites (all done).EDIT: Thanks, Rajaa, but that's a little hefty for my internet setup right now. I'll have to wait until uni starts up again.
Cybaster said, January 23, 2010, 06:45:31 pmWell, it may go faster if you're just separating the eyes. Not only the eyes:
Chosis said, January 24, 2010, 11:44:09 amHero. said, January 23, 2010, 02:10:04 amAnyway, 98% people prefer PhotoshopAs one of that 98%, I've got a problem. Photoshop doesn't have a handy-dandy color replacement tool, so my macro has consisted of Select Color Range > Select Color > Fill. Problem with that is twofold: one, the Fill command stores the exact pixel that's clicked, and two, even without Contiguous you have to click in the selected area for Fill to work. This means that the macro only works on the fluke that one of the selected pixels is the one spot I clicked when I made the macro.Long story short, unless I can make it so clicking anywhere on the image will Fill the selected area with color no matter where it is, this tutorial doesn't work with Photoshop. In the meantime I'm proceeding manually, but it's tough work that I don't see dragging past the finish line. I've done standing, walking, crouching, jumping, turning, crushed guard, and missing a throw; all up 80 out of around 470, not including the claw sprites (all done).EDIT: Thanks, Rajaa, but that's a little hefty for my internet setup right now. I'll have to wait until uni starts up again.Rynestar said, January 25, 2010, 10:55:19 pmIm guessing its a no-go with Photoshop then?Its even more simple in photoshop since the method is based in copy paste, The recording part in photoshop is called "actions", neways1. start by selecting the part you want separated (just like pots) 2.then click record on actions and lets begin, 3.by this point the pallette with the new colors is already made so go to image, color table and load it with both the new ones and the old ones already colored in matching green following the example (matching as in the exact same code for each) and click ok4. press ctrl+c (copy), 5. go to image, color table again and load a second pallette where the green colors are added just like pots said but the old ones are red as they used to be and click ok6. press ctrl+v (paste), 7. click stop in the action menu and thats itopen next sprite select area to be separated and click play...profitNot so clear i know but try going step by step and messing here and there, its much more simple than relying on fill tools or w/e. Or pots could make the photoshop version with pics n stuff .
[V]yn said, January 26, 2010, 12:49:09 amIts even more simple in photoshop since the method is based in copy paste, ...Not so clear i know but try going step by step and messing here and there, its much more simple than relying on fill tools or w/e. Or pots could make the photoshop version with pics n stuff .The new palette is applied to all my sprites; that wasn't my problem. My problem is that in the sprites I have of Balrog, two different colour tones apply to many different areas they shouldn't. The darkest shade of purple on his pants and tattoos is actually the darkest skin tone, the next darkest skintone is used as the darkest shade of yellow on his pants, hair and bangles. I quickly learned that a macro or action won't make fixing this much quicker; as much of the hard work is to do with selecting the different areas to change, not so much the process of filling.
I had a similar scenario when I tried to color separate Rogue. The skin tone was shared with her hair, boots, body suit, jacke- just literally everything. I used [E]'s tutorial to separate her by only deleting certain body parts each pass (about 4 or 5 passes). It was monotonous, but it got the job done.
To make this slightly easier, you can just set the script up by right clicking, going to toolbars, and checking script; that way, you can just press the play button each time you're ready. It's less tedious than: file>script>etc.