[Spriting] How do I edit the portraits properly?

[R999]

So I am really stuck as opposed to what to do with the portrait. From what I can tell, the palettes of the portrait is part of the same sprite BMP exported by ShiShi. Okay so far so good. But in photoshop, it looks really messed up and I guessing that is probably because it is indexing the colors incorrectly. If I were to edit the portrait in PS, firing this up in the Palette editor also looks messed up. Anyway... I have spent enough time fooling around... if someone can direct me to a solution it would be greatly appreciated. I can only use Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks - so if possible I would prefer someone who has had experience with the Adobe apps.


Incase you are wondering, I was learning how to sprite with photoshop (sorry can't stand Paint or other windows stuff), making a lot of avoidable mistakes here and there... and this is the result. I learned the hard way that 16 colors makes you REALLY start to think creatively about colors. Especially if I want to keep the color of the armor / cape 100% independent of eachother and the hair/face.



Color variation possibilities:

spoiler

This is what it looks like ingame.

spoiler

(generic male Paladin class, in place of the Bard).

At this point I am thinking spriting is quite time consuming. If I were to do this again it might have took 1/5th the time, but in the end it would at least take a few hours just to polish it up, etc. Hell well, it's worth it I guess.



edit: I fixed the mouth animation during casting thanks to Shishi Editor.

[Pickle Girl Fanboy]

Oh my god, it's a white mage starring in the fft version of the scarlet letter!

[Cheetah]

I have never gotten Photoshop to work well with palette stuff. I would recommend graphics gale. One look at an exported/unedited sprite from ShiShi and it will make complete sense.

[mav]

Even though I own Photoshop, I still prefer GraphicsGale when it comes to palette editing, cause frankly Photoshop is terrible on this aspect. I haven't looked into this too much, but I'll see what I can figure out and then I'll get back to you. For now see if this video by SentinalBlade helps.

[R999]

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions.

I thought I had figured it out yesterday, but I guess not... I thought that Photoshop would use the first row of colors for the portrait, but it turns out that I was wrong again. I think I understand how the colors for both the sprite and palette are structured, but as far as to getting PS to use the colors for the portrait, it does not show up properly when I load it up in the palette editor or shishi.

PS is like my 3rd arm so it'll be hard for me to adapt to something else like GraphicsGale, especially there's no Mac version available for it (my VMware running XP isn't as responsive as I would like on my Mac).

I have one thing I would like to try though.... I'll get back on this later.

[CidIII]

It also covers this in my Spriting Tutorial, *NOTE #2* about spriting restrictions, in which there are two palettes in each bitmap. One for The Battle Sprite and one for the Portrait.

If the note was too hard to understand, please elaborate so I can make it more readily understandable.

[mav]

The ninth row and beyond are always used for the portrait palette(s). I took a look at the Color Table on Photoshop, but it's a bitch to deal with, though it makes me wonder if editing the ninth row on the Color Table will allow you to post a portrait over...I know that's how it work in GraphicsGale.