incredibly stupid and difficult question - up to the challege?

Let's say you want to design a new image and paste it onto an old pre-defined image that is restricted to 256-color index mode.


You design your new image, and it is made up primarily of beige hues with varying brightness values. And once you pasted your new image onto the old pre-defined image, your colors from the new image drop out and have to conform to the old pre-defined images' restricted color palette. (They turn a dull grayish tone, but the old image that you didn't create stays the same as it always has been.)

The old pre-defined image also has a pre-defined color palette that looks like this -




Let's also say that the best option you have of correcting this problem (you have no other choice but to use indexed-color and a pre-defined palette) is to change the HUES of the pixels and NOT the BRIGHTNESS values. The color palette DOES have beige hues in it - just not in the range you have created.

You want to change the beige hues (that are out of range in the color palette) to beige WITHOUT destroying the original brightness values of the pixels - and STILL conforming to the color palette. (You may have 10 hues of beige to work with, and that's all you want to put on your image..)

How would you go about doing this? It's a difficult thing to figure out - and I've tried almost everything - from the "Replace Colors" option in Photoshop to a couple of palette editors...Nothing has worked or made logical sense...


I'm going to present a story relating to the question - people usually understand the question better if they are given a little background behind it. This IS eventually a Photoshop-related question..Please stay with it if you can..

The Story so far:



Two years ago, my brother and I were working on a mod (or add-on) for the once-popular 1992 PC game Wolf3D, and at the time we used Corel Draw to edit the graphics.

Wolf3D can only support indexed, 256 colors, in 8-bit bitmap mode. Whenever the images were saved, the new colors that weren't in the Wolf3D palette would 'drop' out. If our images had red hues in them that the Wolf3D engine didn't have, they would drop out and be grayish, instead. And the thing is - after all that hard work designing new graphics, if you saved the new graphic you made with the Wolf3D color palette - everything turns gray - but it actually WORKS when you put the image back into the game.


In editing the original Wolf3D graphics you have to conform with the game's color palette. We could edit the graphics fine, and add almost anything we want to. The problem is that the game engine will not accept colors that are out of the pre-defined Wolf3D palette.


Back to the present time, we decided to try again and this time using Photoshop 7. No longer is there any color drop-out in the images when saving to the game's original format (8-bit bitmap, indexed 256-color). But that didn't mean it would work - there may not have been any color drop-out, but we were not using colors supported by the Wofl3D engine.

After working for a while on the images, we decided it was time to port them into the game engine. And then it happened - it gave us errors saying our images had to be 256 color bitmaps! It was very puzzling, because we WERE saving at 256-colors, and some images even had less than 256 colors.

Perhaps our only solutions are:

1. Create our own palettes from all the images we have and eliminate redundant colors in order to fit it all into 256-colors. This can be done - but how? I could take all the images and put it into one huge canvas, and then save the color table or palette that way..

2. Using the original Wolf3D palette, just change the color tones on some newly designed images to conform to the Wolf3D palette.

I have my Photoshop interface set up like this - in the Swatches Palette, I have the Wolf3D color table (which contains the Wolf3D color palette) loaded up. I can select any color from the Wolf3D palette I want from the Swatches.

There two images open - one of the original "monster" from the game and another image with a newly drawn up "monster" (think ridiculous B-movies). I decide to use the monster's head to fit the original monster soldier.

Keep in mind the new monster I designed has a good bit of detail, even though it is still under 256 colors..

I paste the new head on top of the old one (I switched to RGB mode and later, when I save I will switch to indexed mode), and voila'! The colors are just right and everything is in order.


Then I save it as NewMonster138.bmp in index-color mode (not to mention as a 8-bit, bitmap). The new head has a variety of green hues, and you're probably thinking - there's no way all those hues can be in the original color palette of this game. And you're exactly right..

I port it into the game and it tells me that it must be in Wolf3D's color palette.

IMPORTANT: I go back to the image and go to RGB mode, and then back to Indexed color mode - and select CUSTOM and load the Wolf3D color palette - then the newly designed monster head turns gray (because the colors I used do not match). And then if I port the image back into the game, it works! But it's still gray!

So..I sit back and think for a minute..If only I could use the green hues that the original palette had (instead of the green colors from mine), I could get similar looking colors without color drop-out.

(It would be nice to use the burn or dodge tool for this and Photoshop would only recognize Wolf3D's color palette instead of having just "any" green colors availiable.)

If you're straining your brain, trying to think of a solution to this problem - don't limit the answer to just Photoshop..Maybe there are more programs that would do this sort of thing..

I've already tried Google.com on a multitude of "palette editors, converters, etc." and they are all crap...

I've looked at all the options on swatches, all of the options on RGB mode..I always edit the images in RGB mode..

There has to be a way to select a certain area of an image and adjust hue and brightness based on only the colors you want from a pre-defined palette..

Also, I'm not really worried about not being able to use filters or any other tools. As long as I get the right colors to match!


Again, this is what the Wolf palette looks like -

As I only know photoshop. I don't think it will allow you to adjust hue and brightness from a pre-defined palette. I could always be wrong, however.

IMO, the "easiest" way to do this sort of thing would be to take the image you want, convert it to index color. Then change back to RGB. Open up the Wolfenstein palette swatch you made. Then you'd have to manually look at the wolf3d palette, eye drop a color, go back to the new image, use the magic wand on the corresponding color, and replace it with the wolf3d color.

Annoying, but thats all I can think of.

I doubt there's any easy/automatic solution in Photoshop that would create "good" results. As you saw when you loaded up the Wolf3D palette in PS, it can't find good matches and makes everything grey. When that happens, you probably just have to resort to manual color fixing.

If you've spent this long on this experiment, surely doing such a thing wouldn't be that much more of a chore.

thanks - ill keep trying