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Andrea Rovenski

An easy way to recolor a texture?

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Find a program that allows you to either select by color and edit just that selection, or one that allows you to edit the order of entries in the palette. I use GraphicsGale, it's intended for pixel art, and lets you do the latter.

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My favorite free image software is this: http://www.getpaint.net/

Under the "Adjustments" menu, there is a "Curves" tool which you can play around with to enhance/detract from the colors on the image. For example if you wanted to remove all forms of red from the image, you would deselect the blue and green boxes, then drag the curve to the bottom-right.

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Recoloring textures using a recoloring utility alone is not always the best approach, being as though Doom has a limited color pallete. In order to get colors that don't always look washed out, you usually have to apply two different colored versions of the same texture together to create a better looking result.

For example, if you zoom into doom's brown textures, They aren't just brown, but brown with dark grays in between. Another texture, TEKGREN, uses grays among the greens too to make the color less saturated.

If you're interested I can explain a simple way to do this to get the best looking recolored textures.

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XWE has a decent image recolour tool. When you have your image selected, it's under 'image -> color remap'. You can change what each colour gets remapped to. When you have all your colours entered, go to "image -> perform color remap".

If you double click your image you'll be in image editing mode. Selecting pixels will tell you what colour index it is. You can select a colour from the palette and then if you select a pixel and press 1, it will change the colour. Pressing 2 will change it to the next colour in the palette after your selected colour.

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Let's suppose I wanted to create a map with some kind of ancient archealogical dig. I found this marble texture I like because it looks genuinely crafted and I like the skull moating.



But this texture looks far too clean and polished to have been found in a dig site. So I want this texture to look more muddy and aged. If I want the texture to look muddy, obviously I want it brown. But we're fusing colors here, so we'll have to mix brown in combination with another color. If this texture were aged, the color would be more desaturated and faded away, and since brown and gray has proved to work pretty well together in the past, combining it with gray should look pretty good.

So after deciding on the texture I like, and the colors I'd like to mold together, I create two versions of the same texture. One in Brown, and one in Gray. I lowered the gamma correction a little too because I think it could look more sinister that way.



Open up the first gray image in Irfanview, go to Image > Effects > Effects browser... Then scroll down to the effect called "White Noise (snow)" set it to a range like 3 or 4. I set it to 3, In MS Paint, white is considered to be invisible. This effect hollows out the texture so only parts of it are visible. Now go to Edit > Copy, and copy the image.



Now open up the brown colored texture in MS Paint, then got to Edit > Paste to paste the image you copied over top of your current image. Make sure you select the option under the tool bar that makes white transparent. Now the colors of these two textures are fused together to create this brownish-grayish rock. Cool!



Experiment with all of Doom's color ranges and try other fusion styles too. For example, Using MS Paint's Airbrush tool, I white snowed all of the top of this Door and left the bottom bit to create this door with a green nukage trim.

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Most image manipulation software has some sort of hue-shifting or colorization feature. You just have to find one that you like.

One downfall to recolorizing is that Doom uses a palette of 256 colors, so if you recolored it to say, purple, then it's not going to translate very well when you apply the Doom palette to the image (as Doom only has 5 shades of purple). Sometimes after colorization, you have to tweak the contrast or brightness (or the hue again) to find something that will look right with the Doom palette.

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I usually use Irfanview. It's a pretty small download and it does the job.

It has some other photo editing effects too that aren't all that useful for texture editing (though I sometimes use them to make titlepics look cooler)

But yeah, more emphasis on what Earthquake said, Doom's color pallete is limited, so mixing two colored textures together is kinda essential to create something that looks a little more vibrant.

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Manhunt21 said:

Ok, I got Irfanview, and where would I go to recolor? Sorry, if I'm being a n00b.

You can make 5 more variants of your texture via using the "Swap colors" button.

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Manhunt21 said:

I got that but is there a way to create more?

"Enchance colors" option.

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Cell said:

"Enchance colors" option.


On newer versions of Irfanview it is "Color Corrections..." under the Image tab I believe.

SHIFT + G is the shortcut for it.

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Very helpful thread here for anyone. Never knew Infranview could could help do what is shown above, as well as paint! I'll have to try this now :)

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40oz said:

On newer versions of Irfanview it is "Color Corrections..." under the Image tab I believe.

SHIFT + G is the shortcut for it.

When I get there, it 'enhances' things really drastically, nad ups brightness a lot. Or...is it supposed to?

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You can modify the Red Green and Blue values to get the color you want. You said you wanted gray, if you lower the Saturation that should give you a more gray color.

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Well... At least you got the hang of it. I would suggest darkening that green color so that it has the same, or at least close to the same brightness level. I tried doing a version of the same thing you did myself but it didn't come out very well. Doom's blue colors are much darker than its greens.

You might wanna try doing things with colors that are closer to each other. In my experience, You can get just about anything to look cool with gray. That's not always the case though. For example, I tried orange with this Red Rock texture.

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