Prop TransparencyLooking into the invisible regions. | |
Pictures are moved back and forth between your paint program and the
Palace Prop Editor by using the clipboard. If you can open both
applications at the same time, great it's a lot more convenient.
If not, you'll need to use the
Scrapbook as a go-between. The transparency mask is not preserved when pasting pictures back and forth between programs. My method to deal with this is to place the picture on a flat background color that I'm sure I won't be using in the av picture itself. Usually an extreme green or blue ("bluescreen," heh). The color I usually use is [R51 G255 B0] also known (in HTML hexcode style) as #33FF00 This is a "web-safe" color that's already in the Palace CLUT, so Photoshop will never dither it when converting color spaces (Remember, Photoshop can also read a clut file directly as a group of swatches -- so you can easily get a palace-safe color from the swatch screen palette). If you edit props in Photoshop a lot, you might want to make yourself a smaller Photoshop swatch file (viewable in the "Swatches" palette) composed exclusively of colors that you use regularly as backgrounds, rather than the entire 200+. In PS 3 and 4, I put this flat color in a background layer, and leave the av in a transparent foreground layer with a layer mask, "flattening" only when converting to indexed color. When using older versions of Photoshop (like PS2.5 on my ancient, memory-challenged Mac SE/30), I save the flat region as an extra selection channel, too. The transparency channel for the Palace is one bit. That means it's or of it's off. That's not the same as Photoshop, which allows 256 levels for soft edges (feathering) and other effects. So you'll have to stomp on that transparency mask use the PS "Levels" command to force it. Select only the transparency channel (usually #4) (or the layer mask), select Image->Adjust->Levels... and try typing in the values 127 <tab> 1 <tab> 129 in the "Levels" Dialog Box. The grayscales should pin to black and white (or the layer-mask edges will be come jaggy). Once the picture is actually in the Palace Prop Editor, you can easily delete the odd-colored areas with the eraser. Holding down the Control key while erasing will quickly fill-erase large areas of contiguous color. Copying from the Palace prop editor, the transparent areas will go black. If your prop had black edges, you won't know where they are any more! There are two good solutions for this problem: |
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Guess Book Back to the House o Props Last Update: 30 Dec 1998 |
Of course, you might just want to do it the sleazy way. |