About hue shifting.
I've been strugling with that for a while now. I tried using pre made palettes but were dissatisfied with them. Any tips on how to use hues correctly?
Why it keeps turning out that way is probably the result of another problem, the shading.
Shading on most stuff is mostly midtones (
example by Arne).
Depending on how shiny a thing is, specular highlights are small to nil.
Some exceptions are chrome or foil stuff which reflect more, but real tanks are a dull painted/metal, so I think this here is not an exception.
What to get out of that is it's all about the value, so do value work before adding the hues.
Actually you can take a look at this
post also.
The graph shows the hues in those examples are all over the place but it works because they got the values right.
What color something shows up as depends on how much of that color is used. In most of the thread examples (and Arne's example) that's mostly the midtone.
In the forum thread, outside of the midtone, stuff like the shadows/highlight hues are kind of balancing eachother out in a zigzag.
It might have a bias towards warm or cool. If it's not/less affected by that bias then that one color sticks out.
It's a more complex idea but you can get some cool effects using it.
My edit isn't as extreme with the colors. Actually it's pretty basic.
Green-grey is the midtone, but the highlights are more yellow. The combined effect is you get greenish-yellow.
Shadow color adds to that warmth.
Result: sprite that's readable, and looks colored.
Hope this does a good job at somewhat explaining colorization, if there's anything I left out maybe one of the other guys can add to this.