esselfortium
Cumulonimbus Antagonistic Posting
Posts: 5152
Registered: 01-02 |
In Photoshop I make extensive use of Gradient Map adjustment layers to color-adjust images that I'm going to palettize. It allows me to remap the image as grayscale into a gradient made up of whatever colors I want, so I can set up a gradient from Doom palette colors to, for example, map the image into Doom's blue range, or create a map that starts at orange, transitions to Doom's red range at the most optimal point in the palette, then continues with the reds down as dark as it'll go and then switch to the nearest brown.
This isn't some sort of magical palettization function, though, it can just help ease the process significantly if you use it properly. For textures consisting of multiple color ranges, some masking would be required to have different Gradient Map adjustment layers affect different portions of the image, to map them into different color ranges.
To see how it looks paletted, convert to Indexed Color, using the Doom palette as the loaded color table. When working on paletted graphics, I do this a ton of times, just bringing up the Indexed Color conversion dialog to see how it'll look, noting any problems, then clicking Cancel to go back and adjust further to try fixing whatever's not palettizing smoothly.
If you run into issues with visible color banding, create a new layer, fill it with 50% gray (this is probably quickest to do just by filling it with either white or black, hitting Ctrl-I to Invert, then hitting Ctrl-Shift-F to Fade Invert to 50%), do an Add Noise on it (amount probably no more than 20), set its blending mode to Soft Light, and set its opacity to something around 10% or so, finding a compromise between what helps smooth the color transitions and what just looks grainy and yuck. The noise layer should probably go below your gradient map layer(s), and again, make liberal use of the Indexed Color dialog to see how your changes are looking.
I realize you said you're using PSP8, not Photoshop, but hopefully this info will be helpful to someone at least. :P
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02-10-10 17:31 
