Creating your .png image

[Auron1]

Gentlemen, what programs do you use when you create your ships?
Superliminality is mandatory for the game, but when it comes to edit an existing .png image, or even creating a brand new one, what do you use?

I have tried using both Paint (yes, I belong to the old school) and GIMP, but both programs seem to have hard times blending colors... or at least that's what happens to me.
My ideas are quite simple actually:

project #1 - recoloring a Kestrel A in dark blue with red lines (that applies to gibs as well) and add custom details
project #2 - recoloring a Fed. Cruiser A, and removing the Artillery weapon - something I can easily do

As for weapons, crew, rooms and so on I think I've already understood everything I need, I only miss the coloring part. Until I decide to start creating a ship from scratch...

Thank you everyone

[Sleeper Service]

GIMP should be sufficient to do blending. There a a few ways you can do that. It has a "blend" tool that does blending, you can also use colour select in conjunction with the spraypaint tool on low opacity using a large brush to do blending manually. If you want to retain the original blending of the ships you can also colour select everything but the outlines and the glow and the experiment with Colour-->Hue Saturation and Colour-->Colourize.

Whatever you'll do you have to go through the same process for the individual gibs. GIMP will remember your last actions for each procedure, so you can simply reselect what you did before from the drop down menu in the procedure. If you do the blending manually you'll have to coppy the parts you changed and transplant them to the gibs, so Hue Saturation and Colourize procedures are overall more simple to use across multiple images (_base and gibs).

[Auron1]

I tried this

pinpoint color → change color from gray to blue → pinpoint another color → rinse & repeat with darker/lighter versions.

However, the result is quite shameful IMHO...

[R4V3-0N]

I tried this

pinpoint color → change color from gray to blue → pinpoint another color → rinse & repeat with darker/lighter versions.

However, the result is quite shameful IMHO...

If only it was that easy. Personally I suggest using the selection based tools to select areas of the ship and manually colour them in rather with the pencil tool or a bucket.
The other option is to select the area and use colourize or hue and balance or what ever to do the colour changes but they are not perfect. That's how I do most of my ships, they might not be the most effective (I think taxi service has pretty good idea on how to do it fast and quick, then again he rarely or never does any ship with a specific hue or colour in mind in terms of keeping it consistent with vanilla).

[NarnKar]

https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-hue-saturation.html

Using this tool should be sufficient.

If not, try increasing the threshold value on the "select by color" tool (so it'll select those weird shaded bands), then use hue/saturation to adjust the selected region (avoid the paint bucket).

[Auron1]

Somehow I came out with this:



I am quite pleased. Now I have to find the gibs and work on them too.

[R4V3-0N]

image not found/ removed...

[Auron1]

image not found/ removed...

Re-uploaded; it will expire in 24 hours

[R4V3-0N]

image not found/ removed...

Re-uploaded; it will expire in 24 hours

Any reason why not to upload it on Imgur so it doesn't expire?