This is Palsa's guide for altering palettes of graphics ripped from games with Lilie, to improve their quality.

The original post is here.

Problems with this approach

There are some problems with this approach, as Palsa describes here:

"True, the only problem with the palette altering method is that it doesn't work for every picture, some pictures are just. . . awkward, but that's probably another compression problem. Then there is the situation where the actual game adds a border that the graphics tiles do not have included with them, but that is fairly easy to mimic."

So it's probably better to follow [guide] instead.

Introduction

I've managed to figure out how the games load the artwork, and how to mimic it without cutting or using feather and softening types of tools.

Guide

Here is a picture of Lilianne from the Mana Khemia 2 graphics group.

See how rough it looks around the edges?

Well that is how it looks in the game, it has nothing to do with the way it was decompressed. I'll explain.

While looking at the pictures palette, I found out this.

Original palette:

Modified palette:

The 2 yellow colors highlighted in high purple are transparent colors, the one in the lower corner is the primary transparent color.

The 4 blue colors highlighted in red are translucent colors.

The brighter colors represent more translucence and the darker represents a more solid color.

I used these 4 blue colors:

Note, the order may vary on occasion, I just had one where I had to switch the 2 middle colors:

After modifying the color palette, I increased the images color depth to 16 bits, and converted it to a raster layer.

I then selected a portion of the yellow background and used a tool to select all of that specific color of yellow, and nothing else.

After the entire background was selected, I deleted the selection.

Next I selected the brightest color amongst the blue that I had modified earlier:

I used the same tool to select all of that color, once again, nothing else.

After the color was selected, this time I copied it, pasted it into a new layer, went back to the original layer, and deleted all of the blue color from that layer, while still selected.

Then I moved on to the next to lightest color:

, then this , and this , using the same method as with the first blue color.

There should now be 5 separate layers, the first 4 should be the blue colors starting with the brightest and ending with the darkest, the 5th layer should be the original picture, with all of the modified colors deleted.

Moving to the top layer, light blue, I set the layers opacity to 25%.

I then used the tool Manual Color Correction so that everything in the layer would turn black. All transparent portions would remain transparent.

Then I did the same thing on the next 3 layers, though I altered the opacity for each layer. This is how each layer was setup:

• 1st layer - Light Blue - Opacity 25%.
• 2nd layer - Mid Light Blue - Opacity 45%.
• 3rd layer - Mid Dark Blue - Opacity 65%.
• 4th layer - Dark Blue - Opacity 75%.
• 5th layer - Original Picture - Opacity No Alterations.

If followed correctly, the result should look something like this:

I haven't tried any of the other graphics from Mana Khemia 2 yet, though I've found that the other games should use similar methods.

But they might have more or less transparent regions, and they probably wont be located in the same places, so keep that in mind.