workaround for "indexed colours" photoshop bug needed...
polygon
Heya,
my company is working on a few DS games at the moment and I have that one bug when it comes to converting stuff to a 256 colour index palette.
for our sprites we use a transparent colour in the first index, which is always set manually but picking it from the background.
In many cases when I converted the image to index and took a look at the palette with "image > mode > color palette" I saw that colour somewhere in the middle in the index again.
I know many of you now think: " he didn't do his masking right and there are semi transparent pixels in the sprites and they tinted some background pixels!" but this is not the case (happens to manally pixeled sprites as well).
essentially the palette will contain the background colour in the first index and a colour that is the bg colour -1% saturation and -1% brightness somewhere in the area of the 17th to 64th index. (this is the bug colour)
at the moment what I do is convert files to index, convert them back to RGB and convert them to index again. in most cases this get's rid of this palette terrorist. But I had few incidents where it stayed in the palette.
this "workaround" is "ok", but honestly I don't want to waste colours when working with the DS as it's palette 5bits per channel, whereas PS has 8bits. So I will loose even more colours with the transition from PS to Nintendo's Nitro. So every colour I can save is precious to me and I would really appreciate if someone who has a workaround for this is able to share it with me
thanks a bunch!
my company is working on a few DS games at the moment and I have that one bug when it comes to converting stuff to a 256 colour index palette.
for our sprites we use a transparent colour in the first index, which is always set manually but picking it from the background.
In many cases when I converted the image to index and took a look at the palette with "image > mode > color palette" I saw that colour somewhere in the middle in the index again.
I know many of you now think: " he didn't do his masking right and there are semi transparent pixels in the sprites and they tinted some background pixels!" but this is not the case (happens to manally pixeled sprites as well).
essentially the palette will contain the background colour in the first index and a colour that is the bg colour -1% saturation and -1% brightness somewhere in the area of the 17th to 64th index. (this is the bug colour)
at the moment what I do is convert files to index, convert them back to RGB and convert them to index again. in most cases this get's rid of this palette terrorist. But I had few incidents where it stayed in the palette.
this "workaround" is "ok", but honestly I don't want to waste colours when working with the DS as it's palette 5bits per channel, whereas PS has 8bits. So I will loose even more colours with the transition from PS to Nintendo's Nitro. So every colour I can save is precious to me and I would really appreciate if someone who has a workaround for this is able to share it with me
thanks a bunch!
Replies
thanks for your suggestion though
But if you can't afford it you could do like I did and create a few generic actions to convert your palettes easily. Basically flatten your image, convert to indexed, choose "forced" as custom pallette and add your transparency color in the first slot. As long as you use the same background color for all your sprites (we use 255 0 255) it should work fine.
-Image> Mode> Indexed Color...
-choose adaptive or whatever
-Forced: Custom ( a palette will pop up which will be blank by default unless there are earlier settings in place)
-Click the first entry and change it to, eg, 255,0,255 and Ok it.
The chosen colour will always be in the first entry in the palette and should stay in the settings each time you do it.
It does but when you need to save multiple textures each one with a different palette (some will be 8, others 256 or even 32 if it's an alpha map) it's definitely easier to use actions. It's also unnecessary to force the first color of the palette if your texture isn't transparent.
Those actions with the (transparent) suffix automatically place 255 0 255 in the first slot whereas the others don't, so I never had to care about this stuff. Those actions become obsolete as soon as we got Optipix though. As I said it's miles better and easier to manage palettes with this software. The conversion tools are far better and put photoshop's dithering to shame.
Wheel - Here's the DS version, there's a trial version somewhere I believe... http://www.webtech.co.jp/eng/istudio/ds/index.html