How to produce shadows

[torch]

Hi all, long time gawper, short time poster.  I really like what people produce on this site and I was hoping for some advice on some top down tiles I am producing for a game I am writing. 

I have many years experience in coding, but hardly any experience in pixel art.  It wasn't until I read the rules that I realised that 90% of the pixel art I have been drawing is all using smudges and soften brushes which is a big no-no for this site.  I use them because as a pixel newbie, it meant I can bang out placeholder graphics at a fair pace and spend more time working on the game mechanics.  I figure once the game is being tested I can think about the graphics again. 

The image below is a floor tile, (looking straight down, I am not up to writing an isometric engine just yet).  I have put the black borders in just for clarity.  The first tile is how it looks in the light.  The second tile is what it currently looks like by the corner of a wall, where the shadow of the wall has cut through the tile.  The last tile is how it should really look, and has a much better feel.  I did that by subtracting 50 from the rgb values of the colors.  Now I look at it, 50 doesn't seem to be enough. 



Initially, I wanted to take my art that had been soft brushed, find an application, select tools and SHAZAM from the menu and the tile was darker all over, cut out the diagonal half required for the shadow and paste it over the lighter original. 

Maybe you can do this, but it's not in keeping with what this site is about and I owe it to myself to try and learn something rather than go for the quick fix. 

Thank you in advance for your time.  I hope you can give me some pointers. 

[Sherman Gill]

Hmm hmm hmm.
Not sure I fully understand what you're asking of us

Anyway, I'm just gonna say, if you don't wanna take the long route of hand drawing the shadows, you should atleast try a limited hue shifting for maximum purdiness.
Say, instead of -50 to RGB, it's -65 to R, -70 to G, and -50 to b. This should make shadows look colder .

[torch]

Hmm hmm hmm.
Not sure I fully understand what you're asking of us

Well, in my long winded way I was trying to ask for advice on how to do shadows for my tiles, which...

Anyway, I'm just gonna say, if you don't wanna take the long route of hand drawing the shadows, you should atleast try a limited hue shifting for maximum purdiness.
Say, instead of -50 to RGB, it's -65 to R, -70 to G, and -50 to b. This should make shadows look colder .

...you have answered here!  Thank you for that.  Although I am intrigued that you say "if you don't wanna take the long route of hand drawing the shadows, you should at least try a limited hue shifting".  How do I try the hue shift please?  What application do I need to try something like that?  (I am very new to all this!)

[Sherman Gill]

Hue-shifting is just the process of something changin' colors as it gets darker/lighter.
Here's an extreme example:

Generally, things get more warmer (yellow/orange) as they get lighter, and darker things get colder (blue/purple).
That's why in my example RGB thingy(-65,-70,-50 thing), in the last post, it loses mostly red and green, so it looks more blue in the shadow, giving it a cold feeling.

[torch]

I see, thank you. 

Is there an application that you can suggest I try using that will change the hue of all the colors at the same time?  Or do I have to do them one at a time? 

[bengo]

lol Torch you're comedy gold, nah theres no program that will automatically do it, you can do it yourself though.

[torch]

lol Torch you're comedy gold

  I try! 

I searched around the forum and found GraphicsGale is one of the tools of choice so I am going to have a play with that. 

[Lawrence]

When doing pixel art you should really use a program which has the ability to let you easily manipulate indexed palettes. I use mtPaint and Promotion; they both have very good palette manipulation features.

About hue-shifting; if you want to portray something realistically, you have to decide what the ambient colour is or, more accurately put, which light(s) get to shine in the shadows where the 'main' light can't reach. In out door, day time scenes with a clear sky, hues realistically shift from warm highlights to cold shadows because of the yellow hue of sunlight and the blue hue of the rest of the sky (which is able to reach shadows because of the omnipresence of the sky). Of course, that's not always the case because other light-sources can over-ride the sky ambiance. This is just one type of scenario, and you shouldn't think that all scenes should be lit with this type of hue shifting; the lighting of a scene should decide how you shift hues.. unless you are not trying to achieve a realistic representation, of course.