Props!

Prop Transparency in GraphicConverter

Looking into the invisible regions.
Pictures are moved back and forth between GraphicConverter and the Palace Prop Editor by using the clipboard. If you can open both applications at the same time, great if not, you'll need to use the Scrapbook as a go-between. Personally, I prefer using the scrapbook even with adequate memory to run GraphicConverter and Palace together I just find it easier to keep track of everything that way.

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] (or [13107 65535 0] using Apple's Color Picker). This is a color that's already in the Palace color map, so GraphicConverter will never dither it.

Here's an example using a photo of singer James Brown.

orig masked
Original Grayscale Cropped,
Contrast Extended,
Brightened,
Green Masked
sharp palace CLUT
Scaled Down to 44 Pixels
& Sharpened		 Palace-Palette Image
Once the picture is 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:

  1. Since you've been saving a copy of the original prop in GraphicConverter, you may have also saved the mask. You did save the original pic, didn't you? Didn't you? on bg
  2. Position the prop on some flat-colored background other than black, and do a screen grab. The illustration here was made in the "Onyx Room" I painted a blue blob behind the av, then hit the Mac "snapshot" FKey (Cmd-Shift-3). The resulting (RGB) picture is then cropped-down to just the region I need, and I can select the blue with the magic wand, invert the selection, and voila I get just the av.
Of course, you might just want to do it the sleazy way.