Spriting 1- 5 Min Recolor!

[Amethyst]

Ladies and gentlemen, by popular demand, I will be writing a brief series of tutorials on how to sprite using the program GraphicsGale over the next few months. Today, we'll begin with a fairly simple, yet demanded routine- How to recolor a sprite in Graphics Gale. For example, I've taken the sprite of a BW Elite four member, who's design is pretty, but who's color scheme I simply do not agree with. You can see her below, and the end result:

Firstly I'm going to assume that you already have the program installed. If you don't, [url="http://gale.jpn.org/setgalefreeus.exe"]Do Something About That.[/url]

When you first open Gale, chances are you'll see a mess of little boxes hovering everywhere. With minimal difficulty, you should be able to close, open, drag, drop and dock these tool-boxes at will. In this way you can create any sort of set up you'd like. Below is mine, and I've found it to be aptly efficient.

[url="http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.1.png"]http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.1.png[/url]

+AmethystStorm: Make sure you're docking them to the far left of the screen, not the top with the toolbars.
+AmethystStorm: You basically just have to drag with window the the edge of the screen and then some,
+AmethystStorm: then the outline will change appearance.
+AmethystStorm: It should go from a dotted line to like a dotted border.
+AmethystStorm: Then you can dock it in that part of the window.

The only tool boxes that I consistently need are the preview, the palette, and the layer. For this tutorial, only the Palette is necessary. Feel free to close any others at will.
Anyway, I've loaded up my image in Gale, and my workspace is in good order, so I'm ready to begin.

While this isn't terribly necessary for just recoloring, as a matter of habit, I always like to zoom in on my sprite. For precision, you know. To Zoom, click the Magnifying Glass tool from the Toolbar, and click anywhere on the image. Note that LEFT click Zooms IN while RIGHT click Zooms OUT. You can also jump to a magnification via the drop down menu of Magnification percentages nearby.

[url="http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.2.png"]http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.2.png[/url]

Once you're at a comfortable distance, examine your Palette Toolbox. Notice two tabs at the bottom that say RGB and HSL. These stand for Red/Green/Blue and Hue/Saturation/Lighting, and they are two different methods of color choosing. Although it may sound more complex, for our purposes, we prefer HSL. Make sure that one is active.

Finally, to begin, go to the All Frames Menu, and choose Color Depth. You should see a window that looks like this:

[url="http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.3.png"]http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.3.png[/url]

If you choose those setting's, you'll be rockin'. Press OK.

[url="http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.4.png"]http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.4.png[/url]

You'll notice that the Palette selection will change as you do that. When you are in 256 color mode, you no longer have an infinite selection of color to choose from, and therefore, the Palette will reflect ONLY the colors that are actually USED in your image. This means if you change a color on the palette, it will also change every instance of that color in the image.

...Wait, what?
It is through this quick and easy method that we will do our recoloring.

To begin, choose a draw tool from the toolbar. I've circled them in the above image for you. I prefer the Line tool, double-circled, because it offers the greatest control, but for this particular task, the Fill Bucket at far right of the circle does well too.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter, because you're not even drawing with it.
With a Draw Tool, in order to PLACE a color, LEFT click. In order to PICK UP a color, RIGHT CLICK.
In this case, Pick Up the color you want to edit. You'll notice that that color becomes selected in the Palette, too.

Play around with the sliders below the Palette, above where it says HSL (you ARE on HSL, right?). You'll notice it'll automatically change the color of the image too. Like so:

[url="http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.5.png"]http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.5.png[/url]

You can move from color to color as you please. The sliders are as such:
-The Top Slider changes the Hue of the given color, or WHAT color it is. You can instantly turn Blue into Red by changing the hue.
-The Middle Slider changes Saturation, or HOW MUCH of a color is put into it. 0 is grey. 100 is vivid.
-The Bottom Slider changes the Lightness, or- that should be self-explanitory. 0 is black. 100 is white.

Some ground rules. Never go ALL the way to 0 or 100 on the Lightness. You can come as close as 1 and 99 but when you hit the top or bottom you risk image quality. The same goes for taking Saturation to 0. Those are really the only rules.

I continue changing the colors of the hair, like so:

[url="http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.6.png"]http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.6.png[/url]

Not half bad, for a twenty second job! But I've run into a wall. See, I'm going up through the hair colors, and ignoring the darker outline of the hair, what I'm left with is the highlights. If I try and do the usual trick to the highlighted hair color, this happens:

[url="http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.7.png"]http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.7.png[/url]

You see, her face turns blue-grey too. The problem is, Gamefreak reused the same colors for her hair highlights as for that shade of her skin. Well, we simply can't have that. What are we to do?

Click over to your trusty fill took, grab one of those many blank boxes of blackness from your palette, and paint those highlights black. Any black box will work, just make sure you're not using it yet.

[url="http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.8.png"]http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.8.png[/url]

Looks weird now, but keeping that particular box on the palette selected, play with the sliders (feel free to reference the other colors if you need a guiding point for numbers), and having successfully severed the highlights from the skin tone, you are home-free!

[url="http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.9.png"]http://www.pokemonreborn.com/images/st/s1.9.png[/url]

The rest of the sprite was a breeze.
Some last minute-tips. When you're making a color dark, work from the darkest shade, light-wards. If making a color light, work from the lightest shade, dark-wards.
Black and white, though they appear to be colorless, should never have 0 saturation. The prettiest Whites and Blacks are actually a very light/dark blue tone, with around 7-15 saturation.
If you need to move a group of colors lighter, take note of the intervals between shades. So suppose you want colors A B and C to be lighter, and their Lightnesses are 10, 15, and 20, respectively. Preserve the intervals. Make them all lighter, but the same distance. So, for instance, A B and C become 40, 45 and 50.
These are only guidelines. The only rule set in stone is to go with what looks good, and don't be afraid to play around with it to get there.

End result:

Total working time: 3-5 minutes.

Feel free to post your own attempts at this here for all to see!

[Stein]

Cool! Tutorial! YAY!

P.S.
Dear Ame,
I'm glad you have a picture of me as your Avatar pic.
Love,
Saya

[AZKnight]

I have been using Paint for sprite work since forever simply because I've been too lazy to find a better way, though I always knew they were out there. And now you have kind of shoved it in my face, so I can't ignore upgrading to common sense.

[img]http://img802.imageshack.us/img802/1645/caitlinirish.png[/img]

Quickly and sloppily done. Accidentally made her hair reddish and ran with an Irish theme.

Edit:

[img]http://img697.imageshack.us/img697/7156/giimaprep.png[/img]

Slightly more time taken with this one. Figured if Ame wanted to make one E4 member more subdued looking, I'd make one look like an obnoxious preppy from homecoming

[Mashew]

[color="#FFFF00"]Look at our pretty coloring!~[/color]
[color="#00BFFF"]...Its not that good Rin....[/color]
[img]http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/2116/5491.png[/img]

[Maelstrom]

Y so SRS, kngiht? That's what yours makes me think of.