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Color separation (Read 30682 times)

Started by PotS, January 17, 2010, 07:48:08 pm
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Color separation
#1  January 17, 2010, 07:48:08 pm
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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 pants





3- 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 Recording





7- 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
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Re: Color separation
#2  January 17, 2010, 08:12:59 pm
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The wonders of Paint Shop Pro. 8)
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Re: Color separation
#3  January 17, 2010, 08:14:40 pm
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Also I guess step 0 would be firing up a media player. 8)
You can help with Ikemen GO's development by trying out the latest development build and reporting any bugs on GitHub.
My Mugen and Ikemen content can also be found here.
Re: Color separation
#4  January 20, 2010, 11:59:15 pm
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Also I guess step 0 would be firing up a media player. 8)

haha! totally true :D

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.
Re: Color separation
#5  January 21, 2010, 07:49:32 pm
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we have yet to find a method to avoid doing that.
Re: Color separation
#6  January 22, 2010, 10:21:30 am
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This is so simple, yet, not anyone would think about it, unless they thought about it. Thanks. :)
Re: Color separation
#7  January 22, 2010, 05:49:38 pm
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Rednavi still doesn't believe in the magic button. :no:
You can help with Ikemen GO's development by trying out the latest development build and reporting any bugs on GitHub.
My Mugen and Ikemen content can also be found here.
Re: Color separation
#8  January 23, 2010, 02:10:04 am
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I did the IoriĀ“s colur separation in MS Paint. Much more simple IMO.


Anyway, 98% people prefer Photoshop
Re: Color separation
#9  January 23, 2010, 05:18:36 am
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/walt
Re: Color separation
#10  January 23, 2010, 01:49:49 pm
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I doubt it goes faster in MS Paint actually.
My shitty mugen stuff:
Re: Color separation
#11  January 23, 2010, 06:45:31 pm
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Well, it may go faster if you're just separating the eyes. :P
Re: Color separation
#12  January 23, 2010, 07:05:15 pm
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I could've used this a while back. ;D  Thanks, PotS.

SNT

Re: Color separation
#13  January 24, 2010, 11:44:09 am
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Anyway, 98% people prefer Photoshop
As 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.
Last Edit: January 25, 2010, 04:41:49 pm by Chosis
Re: Color separation
#14  January 25, 2010, 10:25:37 pm
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Re: Color separation
#15  January 25, 2010, 10:36:57 pm
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I like the last one  ;P
It's useful separate his pants of his hair.
Check my DeviantArt for more amazing spriting stuff!
https://www.deviantart.com/blueblood2/gallery
Re: Color separation
#16  January 25, 2010, 10:55:19 pm
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Im guessing its a no-go with Photoshop then?

vyn

Re: Color separation
#17  January 26, 2010, 12:49:09 am
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Anyway, 98% people prefer Photoshop
As 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.
Im 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", neways

1. 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 ok
4. 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 ok
6. press ctrl+v (paste),
7. click stop in the action menu and thats it

open next sprite select area to be separated and click play...profit

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 :).
Last Edit: January 26, 2010, 12:55:03 am by [V]yn

SNT

Re: Color separation
#18  January 26, 2010, 07:16:39 am
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Its 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.
Re: Color separation
#19  January 26, 2010, 08:41:47 am
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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.

Last Edit: January 27, 2010, 06:40:02 am by Drex
Re: Color separation
#20  January 27, 2010, 02:18:42 pm
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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.