This is really bugging me....

This is really bugging me....
Have you read the tutorials?
What are you doing now?

I use either Photoshop or a combination of Photoshop and PEdit.
Let me know what you are doing now, so I can make my reply a bit shorter then describing the theory of color.

I too use a combo of Photoshop and PEdit. And just as Bjornlo I think a bit more info is in order. ;)

BTW, SoG, your sig is way too long, 5 lines is the rule, you have 9.

I have the combined BMP storyboard ready. That is where I am...:(

you've completed a few units already, how did you do the palette for those?
What tools do you posses? Which tools do you prefer to use?
Do you want to set a palette to match your unit or change it?

I want one that lets my unit look exactly like it does in game as it does in the bmp storyboard. For my past pallettes a friend was nice enough to make one for me that I used for my previous two units.

Well there are a number of ways to make palettes, the one that will make the type that will most closely match the BMP is as follows:

Create your storyboards (using Steph's SBB)
Pick the storyboard with the widest array of colors, typically the death animation.
backup this storyboard incase you save the wrong file name while playing with the colors.
Open it in your paint program (I use Photoshop, so adjust what follows to match your paint program).
Use the adjust Hue & Saturation tool to reduce all the magenta (background color) to black.
Use the adjust Hue & Saturation tool to reduce all the blue (or your civ color) to black.
This should give you a nice mangled image(I'll refer to this as MImage for simplicty) of around 200-300 colors.
use the color selection gadget to select the pure black and change it to one of the other colors in your image.
Convert the MImage to a indexed color-table image (PCX, GIF etc). Set the initial colors to 256 with no transparency.
Now open the palette (or color table) of the MImage.
You will notice that a number of colors are very close. replace those that are too close to tell apart with a single color. ie: dark dark blue, dark dark red, etc all become black.
Do this by taking a screen capture of your open palette:
Done thusly:
With the palette of your MImage.
Press the CTRL key + the ALT key and then the "print scrn" key at the same time.
Go to the file menu, select new image.
Once the image opens, paste in (CTRL + V) the screen capture of the MImage palette, you will be doing that alot.
Now shrink the size of your MImage so you can see both the MImage and the screen-cap-palette.
Next with the MImage as your active window, open the palette again.
Now you can use the color selection gadget to reduce the colors in your MImage. Continue doing this until you get the total colors down to 160.
This 160 number need not include black, white, civ colors nor magenta(smoke & transparency).
Once you have a palette of only 160 colors, take a screen cap of the palette and save this screen cap as a BMP (no compression). This BMP will be used with PEdit to copy the 160 colors to the units palette.
Read the tutorial on PEdit for instructions on how to use that.

If not, you can also use CorelPhotoPaint6 for saving/exporting palettes. I do it whenever I use Steph´s (M)SBB, he taught me.

thanks guys for the help, i think I have it down now with pedit. strangely though a slight, very small red outline is around my unit, its almost invisible but if you switch to alpha mode in flicster you can notice it.

I had that one time...mine was civ-colored though! I colored it out, one pixel at a time on the storyboard

thanks guys for the help, i think I have it down now with pedit. strangely though a slight, very small red outline is around my unit, its almost invisible but if you switch to alpha mode in flicster you can notice it.
If you zoom-in in the storyboard (PCX version) you will see the source color for this halo. Just use the color select, and replace the color.

Thankyou for the help Bjorn. Do you use the same program Wyrm uses by any chance?

Mostly, yes.
Wyrmshadow uses Bryce, photoshop, truespace and occasionaly some other tools.
I use Byrce Bryce, Photoshop, Lightwave and occasionally some other tools.

I have some modules for Lightwave if your interested. Futuristic fighters and some capital starships.