pro motion: manual color reduction, technically speaking

[kakikukeko]

Hi,

here is my "problem":
let's say I have 3 colors in my palette, black, green , blue.. all used..
Now I just want to have 2 colors, and I want to change all the green pixels to blue...
How to do this, without having to repixel all the green pixels in blue? (that's how I did so far but I'm getting lazier and lazier it seems  )

I tried to copy the blue on the green (in the palette) and then removed unused colors or duplicate colors but it doesn't do what I want..

edit: ok I just found a way, using the stencil that kind of works, but I was wondering if a "cleaner" way exists , just using the tools from the Colors menu /palette..

[miascugh]

You could also do it this way: Copy the blue over the green in the palette, remove duplicate colors and then remap colors (for this frame or the whole animation).

Remap Colors (submenu)
If you change the color table but you don't want these changes to take affect to the image. This function adapts all colors of an image to their current color table according to the colors the image had before the change. You can remap the colors of Frame, Animation, Brush and Brush to Gradient which remaps the brush to the currently selected gradient. Ideal to use certain palette regions for different graphic tiles.

[snake]

If you're swapping colours in a still picture, using photoshop is usually a quick option.

If you have Photoshop you can just paste the piece in there, use the Wand tool and uncheck Anti-alias, Contiguous and Sample all layers in the top banner. When you now select a specific colour, it selects everything with that colour.

Of course, if you're feeling desperate you can also use MS paint. Select the first colour as the one you want to replace, and the second as the one replacing it. Then use the erase tool over the colour you want replaced using the right mousebutton.

Pretty much useless for animation of course.

[miascugh]

Well, all this would actually be 'worse' in a sense, since changing single colors is not the problem here, but maintaining a nice and clean index-palette, which ultimately are messed up in PS as far as I know (they definitely are in PSP7, even though it has index colour-modes).

[Akira]

couldn't you just give the two colours the same rbg value and then sort colours and then remove unused colours? i tested and it seemed to work.

Edit: tested it again and it still works.

[miascugh]

Well, this would rearrange your whole palette though, which is not good if you want to keep different ramps apart.

[kakikukeko]

snake: the wand tool only works on contiguous part of the drawing on my version of PS.. for this, I think "color range"with no fuzziness works better.. otherwise, yes photoshop works , you 're right, just I don't feel to open PS just for this  (and I don't see the point of MS paint as I use promotion  ) , thx anyway..

Akira, when I remove unused colors nothing happens because all colors are still used, so it doesn't remove anything.. when I press remove duplicate colors, it really removes the color  from the palette, but all the pixels that indexed this color become black.. so actually Miascugh 's trick is the best,

Miascugh, thx, it works perfectly       I will stick to this method until I find -hear of - a faster one 

I'm really surprised there is not an  automatic way to do this action tho.. 

[Mr.Modem]

Another way to do it, is to use the stencil tool. This method is a little bit slower but can be used if you want to replace one colour with several other colours (hope you understand. I'm not good at explaining this). Choose the colour you want to replace in the stencil dialog box and press the invert stencil button. You can now paint in the new colour with a standard brush tool, shape tool or whatever. It's very similar to the magic wand tool in Photoshop.

Btw, I think we should make a sticky thread where we can gather all those nifty tricks that can be made with Pro Motion.

[AdamTierney]

Yeah, I basically do what Mia said.

1) Create a duplicate frame.
2) Turn off equal palllettes.
3) In frame 2, copy green over to blue.
4) In frame 1, erase blue.
5) Do single pallette > 1 to 2.
6) Erase frame 1.

The issue is that Pro Motion doesn't see 'colors'. It just sees which pixels pull from which pallette spot. This is  important because most pixel games (GBA, mobile, etc) use palllette rows, so even though I have a 0,0,0 black in multiple rows, different sprites have to use different pallette sprites to ensure a 1-row sprite.

[Helm]

Though a quick 'remove duplicate colors' runthrough takes care of that if somebody needs it.

[ptoing]

easier ways in promotion.

select eyedropper and alt+click on the green pixels while having the blue selected. all greens will become blue and then you can just kick the green out of the palette.

[kakikukeko]

Thx a lot Ptoing!   Helm was saying in an other thread that you know pretty well promotion, so I was hoping for an answer from you     
how the hll do you know that??  ( Are you beta tester by chance? )

I think a way to do the same via the palette would be kickass to speed up the process when you need to do this on many colors.. but that's good enough for my needs
thx again!

Adam, thx for your input too, haven't check your method yet.. I'll have a try when I start to learn the animation tools 

[ptoing]

I think that is documented somewhere. But I hope PM 6 gets to beta state soon because I will test that But Jan is being busy with other stuff.

[ptoing]

if you want to do it to many colours at a time you can also set the stencil so that the colours you want to exchange are not selected (manipulatable), set the right-button colour to what you want them replaced with and press K (clear). I am pretty sure that it should work (no PM to test where I am atm)

Also, PM is such a small program that once you used it for some time ( I use it since about 3 years now I think) you can come up with really fast solutions for stuff like this on the fly pretty much.

[Stwelin]

Well, all this would actually be 'worse' in a sense, since changing single colors is not the problem here, but maintaining a nice and clean index-palette, which ultimately are messed up in PS as far as I know (they definitely are in PSP7, even though it has index colour-modes).

You just have to be careful about what tools you are using. I used to use ps7 and i never had any trouble maintaining my palette.

[kakikukeko]

if you want to do it to many colours at a time you can also set the stencil so that the colours you want to exchange are not selected (manipulatable), set the right-button colour to what you want them replaced with and press K (clear). I am pretty sure that it should work (no PM to test where I am atm)

I just checked and yes it works, but I was not saying many colors at a time but one by one,like: replace blue by dark blue, green by medium green, dark green by dark purple etc... so finally in this case, I think Miascugh 's method is the fastest.. you  can easily set the palette by hue or brightness then editting the palette, copy a color over an unnecessary one, do this many times with different colors.. then delete duplicates and finally remap..

(I think adding a "Fusion with " button in the edit pallette would be cool  but may be it's just I who miss it , with my crappy methodology  )
thx again

[dragonrc]

here is my "problem":
let's say I have 3 colors in my palette, black, green , blue.. all used..
Now I just want to have 2 colors, and I want to change all the green pixels to blue...
How to do this, without having to repixel all the green pixels in blue? (that's how I did so far but I'm getting lazier and lazier it seems  )

I know a very easy way. In Paint:
Select this tool:
Now right click on the blue colour and left click on the green colour.
In the bottom left it should be like this:
Now select this tool:
Then right click and hold and go over the green parts, they now should change to blue.