Texture Recolouring - How do you do it?

Bonjour

So I've been messing around with some doom and doom2 patches in photoshop using the doom pallete swatch. I typically use the option "Replace colour" and select a color from the texture, then choose a replacement from the swatch. Sometimes it works well but other times it seems to find a colour inbetween both the original and replacement. It gets nasty when converting back to indexed (choosing again the doom pal) and can get nastier in doom. As I say, sometimes it doesn't look too bad but other times, ew... Check my derping around with doom's sky3 here, which isn't so bad http://imgur.com/a/GJIfS

So how do you recolour nuts pull it off? I've seen lots of great jobs done before and wonder what program and options you use? Ps feel free to show off anything cool.

supose you try GIMP
might help

From within SLADE 3. :)

Look up the colour remap, colourise and tint features. They can do pretty cool things.

Thanks for the input guys. I tried gimp but argh, it was a more painful experience. Can I somehow limit the amount of colors availible to the doom pal before recoloring?

SLADE3 seems ok and has a few people now fighting its corner for this, just need to experiment more with this it i find my next batch of motivational coffee!

I use Photoshop for it. From the Layer menu, I create Adjustment Layers for Hue/Saturation (to shift the hue and saturation of the colors that currently exist, or to colorize something that's currently grayscale), Brightness/Contrast, and/or Gradient Map to do coloring for my textures and edits. I recommend using adjustment layers because they're non-destructive editing: you can set them up one way, then change them later, or even disable them completely without affecting your original graphic at all. That way, they make trial-and-error stuff like palettization a lot less painful.

Sometimes it's simple enough to just shift the hue a bit, but other times you need to adjust the brightness and contrast some to fit it better into the palette ranges. Other times it's best to use a Gradient Map, which maps the light-to-dark range of your image into a gradient of your choosing. You can then create a gradient using colors taken from the Doom palette, and shift them around a bit until you get something that palettizes as perfectly as is possible.

esselfortium said:

I use Photoshop for it. From the Layer menu, I create Adjustment Layers for Hue/Saturation (to shift the hue and saturation of the colors that currently exist, or to colorize something that's currently grayscale), Brightness/Contrast, and/or Gradient Map to do coloring for my textures and edits. I recommend using adjustment layers because they're non-destructive editing: you can set them up one way, then change them later, or even disable them completely without affecting your original graphic at all. That way, they make trial-and-error stuff like palettization a lot less painful.

You say that as if any of those options are available when you open a Doom texture.

I'm assuming you convert from indexed color to RGB, and I can do that just fine, but how do you change it back?

I can load the Doom color table from the indexed selection mode after making adjustments, but instead of rounding to the closest available colors, it turns almost all of the adjustments to grayscale.

Do you have some kind of way to work within the Doom palette, or do you always change to RGB and keep adjusting/indexing until it finally works?

For me, I have all my layers and blending effects visible for the texture I want to create from my source layers. I then switch to Indexed mode, which remembers my Doom palette and applies that. From here I can mess around with the dithering options to refine it more.

However, you need to have an intimate familiarity with the Doom palette to be able to recognize what colors will look the best. Usually I have to tweak saturation or brightness a bit to get parts of the image to fall within the Doom color ramps. This doesn't really consume that much time, but occasionally I'll run into some shades that just won't translate well without washing out the color detail (typically oranges/reds/golds/yellows).

If I need really precise color remapping, then I'll load up a texture into XWE and use its palette remapping tools to exactly set which colors I want to replace.

SLADE features a color remapping tool too. Just pointing that out. You can even save color translations as text files and reload them later. You can use ZDoom's syntax, which means that you can also remap color ranges to color gradients.

Just saying.

Also, for image editing tools, SLADE can export plain old PLAYPALs as palettes as JASC and GIMP palettes, too. Pretty handy.

Lüt said:

You say that as if any of those options are available when you open a Doom texture.

I'm assuming you convert from indexed color to RGB, and I can do that just fine, but how do you change it back?

I can load the Doom color table from the indexed selection mode after making adjustments, but instead of rounding to the closest available colors, it turns almost all of the adjustments to grayscale.

Do you have some kind of way to work within the Doom palette, or do you always change to RGB and keep adjusting/indexing until it finally works?

I work in RGB color and convert to indexed, yeah, using the Doom palette. If you're getting stuff turning to grayscale or other undesired colors when palettizing, you probably need to adjust their hue/saturation somehow to more closely match a color range available in the palette.

Also, I don't ever dither during conversion.
It gives much more control, and more consistent results, to instead manually put a subtle layer of noise in the image itself. Start with a layer of 50% gray, use blending mode Soft Light or Overlay (because they'll preserve color information and because 50% gray is completely transparent with them), add some auto-generated noise or whatever other basic diffusing texture of your liking, then set the opacity to a very low amount.

While you *can* use the SLADE3 colourise/tint functions, you'll probably get much better results doing it manually using a real image manipulation program (I personally use Paint Shop Pro). One thing they can't do (afaik) though is the palette range remapping which has been mentioned, and arguably this method will produce the best results.