$12256 / $11500
Hey any artist out there....would you want to buy a cheap program that allowed you to upload spritehseets into the program, select which colors you want to change and then click 1 button and all those pixels would change accordingly? It's a pixel art color converter.
I'm currently having artwork done for an app that will be released on the Andriod Market, and because my partner and I's resources are limited, to save money we are taking artwork we paid for and changing the colors of the sprites to make more enemies. This is a good amount of work because there are many frames. So I decided to save us time and money, I coded up a program that allows me to read a sprite-sheet and alter each and every color if I wanted by just entering the information in by hand, and then the computer does all the color modification for you, rather then having to do it by hand inside of paint or photo-shop.
My first question is does anyone know if software like this already exists? If so what are some names of programs and would you as an artist think this is a good idea to save time ? Or even as a developer that is looking to trim the edges in spending money and use this program to get more artwork quickly and cheap.
Please let me know what you guys think!
-Thanks
-Anthony
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I usually use Gimp - you can use Select by Color with the threshold turned way down to select all regions of a given color at once, then use Bucket Fill with the Shift key to fill the entire selection with the new color. It's a bit of a process, though, and I could definitely see the utility of an easy-to-use palette management tool for pixel art.
My project: Bits & Bots
I wouldn't buy it. I have photoshop and all I need to do is have the magic wand tool with the right settings and color changing is as simple as one click and a key command. To do multiples the same way I could set up a action and then it would just be a button press to not only do that but also save and close the document. Very quick and pretty painless. I would be more interested in a tool that would let me tweak the colors of an indexed pallet directly so that I could do things like rotating colors and other fun things like I used to be able to on my parent's Atari, but more because of nastolgia and curiosity than any real usefulness.
Besides the photo editor methods desribed already every dedicated pixelart editor (grafX2, GraphicsGale, ProMotion, etc.) and some photo editors (Gimp certainly) has indexed-mode image editing so you just have to change a palette entry for the colour of all pixels using that palette entry to be changed.
Most have a far from optimal interface for palette editing. GraphicsGale is the best I've found where you can just drag and drop colours but still lacking many desirable features.
Using an external program for such an integral task is really not desiable at all.
If you could add tightly integrated advanced palette manipulation functionality as an extension to an existing editor that could be desirable.
Red warrior needs caffeine badly.
If you made the color converter do other things as well and do them in a convenient way, I might consider a $3 purchase through some place like Envato or maybe Amazon. If it saves me the headache of loading bulky art suites and does things very fast and easily, it's worth a few dollars to me. That said, I try not to buy directly from people anymore, because it is tough to get updates that way. I prefer to have a middleman to download through, like Amazon or Envato. :)
If you came up with a color converter that ran through JS or something like that, however, I would just share the code on GitHub and gain a bit of internet fame from it. If nothing else, it can help you find jobs.
Syrsly
Twitch Streamer, Web/Game Developer, & Artist
syrsly.com - contact me for commissions, thanks!
Yea I only planned on selling it for a few dollars, nothing crazy or expensive. I know sometimes with that magic wand tool, I use it, but if there is a color too similair in the same region as the region selected, it will also highlight that undesired color as well. Also if you are NOT an artist, and you dont have the luxury of having all the photoshop .psd files and don't have all the layers named correctly and in order, it become a real pain to change colors for 30 frames of a charatcer.
So far this program I made if very simple. It allows you to enter the Current RGB values you want to change and the next to that text field, you can enter the new RGB color you want it to be replaced by. It aslo has an RGB slider and a preview for a color chooser. So when you are trying to see which color would look good in replace of your curent color, you can play around with the RGB values of the slider, and the preview rectangle box will change colors and you can see the exact color of the RGB values you want for your new color entry. Then you enter the current color you want changed, the new color next to it, the hit convert, and the program will show you what the sprite will look like with those new colors.
Also on the top of the screen with the color preview box, there are 3 images of the first sprite from the sritesheet. The way the program works is it reads a spritesheet from a specified file, then it takes the first sprite in the first row and first coloumn of that spritesheet, and it renders 3 pictures of that sprite for a preview. This image is the original size of the sprite, 2 times the sprite size, and then 4 times the sprite size. These preview images change each time you enter colors into the rgb text fields and then hit the convert button. This way you can actually see what the new colors look like as a preview. The is also a RESET button that will change the preview image back to the original way it looked before you changed it around.
Once you are done you can name your file in the given text field. You must gie the file a name and an extension. ie: gameSprites.png
Finally there is a generate sprite-sheet button underneath the preview screen. Once you are 100% completed and satisfied with the color of the sprite preview, and you have named your file, you can hit the Generate Sprite-Sheet button and the program will Create a new file for you in the specified file location and save that file for you. Now if you go to your Computer and check that file location, there will be a new file in there of a sprite-sheet, with all of the new colors you just made!
So far this is all the features the program offers and if I do try and sell it I will make sure to eep updating the software monthly, by reading reviews and trying to make the users happy with new features they ask for.
If anybody has any more ideas for somethings I can add to this program to make it better/more desirable, please leave more comments/criticisim below. Even if it's negative criticism, I'd like to hear it all and learn from it.
- Thansk so much!
- Anthony
Just set the tollerance to 0 and that's not a problem anymore.
So, is one of the features that you can open a layered file and change the color regardless of layer? If so, that sounds much more interesting!
So by a layered object, you mean an picture that has multiple photshop layers? If this is what you mean then yes it can do that. The way it works is the program searches the sprite/image pixel by pixel, one pixel at a time and reads the RGB value of each pixel.
You can enter up to 5 current RGB values at one time and 5 new rgb values that coorespond. When you are chosing new colors to replace the current colors, there is a seperate RGB color slider, that you can slider the colors around for R, G, B and you can preview what that color looksmlike min a small preview rectangle area.
Then when you hit the convert button, the program runs through the spritesheet, runs through every sprite on the spritesheet, and it looks form all of the RGB values you entered in for the current value text fields. It then replaces all those pixels with those colors, with the cooresponding new rgb values that you have entered.
There are 3 previews on the screen of an actual sprite from the spritehsheet. By default it chooses the very first sprite to use as a preview example. Each one of these 3 sprite peviews are different sizes. The first is the actual size of the the sprite in-game, the second is slightly larger an is twice the size of the actualy sprite and the third image is 4 times as big. This is so the user can see what the sprite actually looks like when he changes the colors around and can view it up close as well as in-game size.
There is also a reset button. At any point in time you can hit this button and the image will reset to its original form all with original colors. Finally when you are done and all the colors are the way that you want. You can click the button that says create sprite-sheet and it will create a new sprite-sheet with all the same frames as the original, but with the new colrors. Before you click this button you must type in the file destination and the program will save the spritesheet with the name you give it, in that location.
Please if you have any more suggestions/ advice/ negative viewpoints/ constructive critisism/
I ill listen to and appreciate them all. Thanks!
I you've got a limited colour image then it will still be much easier to directly manipulate the palette values.
If you've got a full colour image then changing just 5 specific colour values is basically useless. You'd need some kind of colourspace volume to volume mapping for decent colour theming.
Red warrior needs caffeine badly.
And I just added two new features.
First of all i made it much easier to select the color you want to change. Literally all you have to do is click on the preview image. And then that color you click on will be the color that will be changed. Then once you have a color highlighted that you would like to change, there is an RGB slider that you can choose a new color to change it to and there is a color box to preview the color. Then when you are happy with the color you can click convert and then the colors will be swapped. Once you are happy with the new color scheme, you can click create sprite-sheet and a new file will be created for you will the new color for all the sprites.
Also I just added a Scale Image feature. this feature allow you to enter an amount you would like to scale the image by. If you select 2 for example, when you create the sprite sheet, the entire sheet will be twice the size and ALL of the sprites on the page will be scaled up twice the size. Also it works the opposite way if you select .5
When the image is rescaled, it is not distorted at all and now you have a new sprite sheet will all new colors and all the sprites are scaled to a new size. The scaling feature can also be helpful for creating "bigger version of a sprite" ie: in super mario bros when you get a mushroom and mario grows.
The next feature I'm working on is to have a color palette on the side, that has 10-12 different colors in it. This way once you click on the old color of the sprite you want to change, you can select from 12 basic colors of what you want to change the pixels to. Then you can use the RGB slider to alter the color you just selected from the color palette.
Also in both corners on the screen, one in the bottom left and one in the bottom right...there are preview boxes that change colors according to the old color you are changing and tge new color you want. So what I mean by this is you can preview the old color you selected once you click on the color on the sprite, that preview box will turn that color until you reclick and choose another portion of the image you would like to change. Then other preview box is for the new color you select. So once you choose a color from the color palette, you can alter that color to whatever color shade you like and while doing this you can preview what the color looks like in the preview box.
So basically the new features are
1) a color dropper/picker that you can use you easily select the part of the sprite you want to grab color from and change
2) an option to scale your image however you like WITHOUT distortion and it will create a new file for you with a rescaled image. All of the sprites on the spritesheet will be rescaled to that new size
3) COMING SOON - a color palette that you can select from 12 pre-selected colors to change the sprite color to. Then once you select a color, you can alter this colors RGB values however you using the RGB sliders and may like to choose whatever shade color you desire.
Yea so I changed it a little. Took away the text fields completely. And now you just click on the image, and whatever color is where you clicked, will be the highlighted color in the "Current Color" preview box. Then you can use the RGB slider to chose and new color which will be shown in the "New Color" preview box. Then you hit convert and thats it.
I'm going to add a color palette of like 12 colors also as colors that you can click on as a base for your New Color. Then you can alter that color using the RGB slider and you can see the color change in the "New Color" preview box