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I wonder what are the best settings to decrease color depth before you save your skin as a bitmap (in PSP 7). Sometimes it looks rather crappy sometimes rather good.
And some skinners seem to have found a way to do that without much loss of quality (Hammerd or CanonUK for example).
How do you do that?
Oh and another question: is it possible to reduce color depth with GIMP? I didn't find any option yet.
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I wonder what are the best settings to decrease color depth before you save your skin as a bitmap (in PSP 7). Sometimes it looks rather crappy sometimes rather good.
And some skinners seem to have found a way to do that without much loss of quality (Hammerd or CanonUK for example).
How do you do that?
Oh and another question: is it possible to reduce color depth with GIMP? I didn't find any option yet.
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You might want to wait for one of the real pros to answer, but these are the settings that seem to work best for me:
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I'm just saying...
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I generally use these settings...
256 colors
Error Diffusion
Adaptive palette
Indeed the quality of the conversion can be spotty. Skins with very smooth solid tones are easy to make if you use colors which are known to convert to 256 colors with NO dithering required. Make a test page that is striped with colors that are very nearly the same shade, just a bit of difference each, and convert the page to 256 colors. You'll see which colors are less likely to dither worse than others, and use that 'hue' in your skin.
Also take care along the edges of camo marks, since the two colors may produce very odd dither colors. In extreme cases, it may be necessary to minimize the level of 'feather' along the color border, or randomize the boundry area before performing color depth conversion to 'force' the palette.
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<A HREF="http://forums.ubi.com/messages/message_view-topic.asp?name=us_il2sturmovik_gd&id=zhiwg" TARGET=_blank>"Whirlwind Whiner"
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Message Edited on 06/23/0307:22AM by adlabs6
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Thanks, guys! I'll try that out.
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My suggestion would be: save it it 24Bit depth and then use B.R.I.G.H.T. (Best palette Reduction for Industrial Grade High quality Textures) from Erik de Neve (Epic Games).
Thats the tool they used in Unreal Tournament to compute the 256color-textures. This proggy is simply amazing! Check it out. Its (IMHO) way better then the routines in Photoshop 7.
Simply download it, save your 24Bit BMPs, open an command prompt in a directory with bright and your 24bit bmpâ´s and type "bright *.bmp -o -bmp -colors256". Then bright will convert all the bmps in this directory to 256colors with EXTREMLY high quality. (it will OVERWRITE them!! (due to the -o parameter)
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I use PSP7 too.I save my schemes in the following way:
1/save the template as a PSD file into whatever folder you use to hold your templates to work on.(I have one on my desktop I called "FB Utilities").This allows you to come back and work on the layered template as you see fit.
2/Now save it as a GIF file,it tells you it will be reduced to 256 colors and have no Alpha channels and asks if you wish to continue,click Yes.Once done close the template.
3/Now re-open the GIF template and save it into the relevant aircraft skin file in the game as a BMP file.
Job done!
I found that saving the initial PSD file straight to a 256 color BMP file lead to color distortion occuring.The GIF step has eliminated it.If you have any of my skins try comparing one of my first ones to one of my latest and you should see the difference.
Hope that helps.
Bo_Nidle
Get my skins at: www.mudmovers.com and www.il2skins.com the full screenshots are available at www.tangodown.co.uk
"You've got to treat your kite like you treat your woman! Get inside her 10 times a day and take her to heaven and back!"Lord Flashheart RFC 1917.
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Thanks, I tried out Bo Nidle's trick with gif-files and it's an improvement.
But than I tried BRIGHT as InsaneDruid said and I think it's simply awfull! It nearly looks like 24 Bit.
That was more than worth downloading the 61 KB [img]/i/smilies/16x16_smiley-wink.gif[/img]
Edit: It's of course awesome not awful... my mistake
Message Edited on 06/23/0312:03PM by Vermicelli
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You think it's awful or awesome?
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I'm just saying...
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Is the Gamespy Fileplanet the only place to get the B.R.I.G.H.T. software? They want a pile of info about everything I play, think and do... likely for a Spam fest.
I'd like to try B.R.I.G.H.T. out if I can without all the baloney from the downloader, if possible.
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<small>Click the pic to download my skins from mudmovers.com!</small>
</font>Skinner's Guide at mudmovers | Skinner's heaven | IL2skins <font color="#999999">
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Current Wallpaper: <font color="#999999">P-51D Flyover</font></font>
<A HREF="http://forums.ubi.com/messages/message_view-topic.asp?name=us_il2sturmovik_gd&id=zhiwg" TARGET=_blank>"Whirlwind Whiner"
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