[dunkelgrun]

I have my 512 x 512 pixel tile;
I've made a seamless image for it;
Saved it as .tga, no compression etc.;
Added it in the mapmods/maps/_Tex folder and added the necessary line in the appropriate load.ini;
Looked at it in game and it shows up just fine.

Now here's the rub - and it's something that's been mentioned on here before - the tile image is far too bright, almost luminous. I know what I need to do, adjust some values, but not how to do it. Is there a hard and fast rule for all tiles or are they all different in this respect?

Now, bear in mind that I'm fairly close to a novice with Photoshop and Gimp, can anyone explain what I have to do to get the tile displaying how I want it to look?

Do I have to adjust Hue/Saturation, Contrast/ Brightness, Colour Balance, Layer Properties or anything else, and do I need to play with all of them or just one? I've had a go and fiddled with them all but can't get it to look right.

If someone can give me a 1-2-3 of adjustments I'll be a really happy bunny!

:cheers:

[Thrud]

just adjust the brightness lower and the contrast to your liking. you'll start to get an idea of how much to adjust the values.

you are correct that the game renders the textures brighter. just adjust them with that data in mind.

[canonuk]

Basically just experiment. The engine renders different colours differently. I found that generally greens get rendered too blue, and everything needs to be desaturated a little.

No hard/fast rules I'm afraid.

[mandrill7]

I use PSP7. There is a colour adjustment tab which - when clicked brings up a selection of dialogue boxes for the various ways to adjust. I would guess GIMP has something similar. It's just a matter of trial and error.

Make sure you back up your .tga's whenever you make changes.

Layer properties doesn't sound relevant. Brightness will definitely tone your tile down. Colour balance I usually only use for messing with the blue-yellow slider for getting my greens to match up.

Saturation is really the "intensity" of patches of colour. If you reduce it, you'll get an increasingly "greyed-out" colour, like fading newsprint.

[caldrail]

There's a number of ways to reduce the garishness of colour.

Brightness/Contrast
Making an image less bright is obvious, but you might need to adjust contrast as well or the colours sometimes appear washed out or too severe.

Hue/Saturation/Lightness
Hue changes the colour bias. You could use it to create desert colours or make a desert green and verdant for instance.

Saturation controls how much colour there is. Reducing it will make the image look more dull and grey, raising it will make the colours more vivid. Usually less saturation is needed in transferring images into IL2 but remember to adjust lightness or the increased greyness might change the brightness of the image.

Do I need to discuss lightness? Making an image lighter will reduce contrast (you could increase contrast or use saturation to compensate)

Gamma
This one is similar to lightness except that saturation doesn't change.

Colour
This one goes by various names and application, but basically you can control how much red, blue, or green your image has. Adjusting the levels will produce startling changes but moving them together is a similar effect to saturation, just a little more detailed.

As you can see, adjusting colours in graphics is a matter of balancing various things to suit your needs.

[dunkelgrun]

Thanks for the replies chaps - I'll experiment.

:cheers: