Get a working palette in under 10 minutes!!! [New method and program]

[polyphemus]

TAKES 10 min when you are well versed in this method!!

This is a new way tom2050 and I found (mostly tom) and I wrote a tutorial on it!! It's a .rar file which extracts into a .doc file with .wmv videos and pictures to help you along the way. Hope its helpful and leads you all to create many more units!!!

I go into detail on how to apply this method in Paint Shop Pro as well as in GIMP!!!! Please feel free to leave any comments or questions here and I'll get back to them as soon as I can. Oh and have your speakers muted when you watch the videos because I did it on the plain and forgot to mute my mic so there is a lot of background noise (ooops). Here it is...enjoy!!

http://www.mediafire.com/file/9empew4m3sed8pr/Civ3 Palette Editting Tutorial.rar

 

[WildWeazel]

That's one odd delivery, but I'm glad someone did this. I'd have killed for a step-by-step palette making tutorial for GIMP when I first starting messing with graphics.

 

[polyphemus]

the delivery?? haha the file was too big to host here, and the mods (thunderfall) didnt return any of my messages regarding ftp access or a two part download.....

and i thought it best to teach with videos and pics...after all i like to pimp my tutorials out

 

[WildWeazel]

I was referring to this part

It's a .rar file which extracts into a .doc file with .wmv videos and pictures

 

[polyphemus]

oh haha, i just wanted to make it as easy to follow as possible

 

[Steph]

I read your tutorial, but I think there is still an important bottleneck in that.
At one point, you suggest to reduce the colour to 160 with PSP.

The problem with this is I think the result is not always good. Very often, it changes the unit a little too much.

What I'm doing is using a more visual approach, where I add some colours, and then try to apply the palette, and see, visually, if some colours change too much.

And then I add them in the palette.

 

[Virote_Considon]

With PSP, when reducing colours, there's one choice, "Optimized Median Cut" and "Standard / Web-Safe", and it defaults to the latter, but I've found that if you change it to the former, it usually affects the palette hell of a lot less (in fact, I don't notice a change between the original and the new palette at all, myself). At least, this is the case in version 9, although I doubt it would be much different in other versions. Do you know about this? If not, it could be why things appear worse when you reduce the palette?

I know in some of the units when I first started making palettes myself, I didn't know this, and the palettes often looked worse than they should (in fact, I remember updating one of my units once after I'd found this out!)

 

[Steph]

Even with Optimized median cut, I find the result not so good, and I often get something visually better with a manual approach