chart making helps

[wakamoochi]

Hello all. I just registered a hot 5 minutes ago, and already I'm posting to bug ya

I've been dabbling in KGChart stuffs for about a month now, and most game sprite images I use work out pretty nice. I'm having trouble, though, whenever I try to chart something that's not a sprite. In the original picture, there will be a wonderful black border around the image, but importing to KGChart makes the edges get wonky, and I end up with about 3 shades of gray along the outside. I've tried doing a few things in GIMP with the image before importing it to KGChart, but I'm obviously doing something wrong. Any ideas or do you need a visual?

Sorry if this doesn't make any sense. I promise I'm not crazy. Not entirely at least

[Servotron]

That's a problem you will always have when converting non-sprite pictures. Try using my guide here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=475

Basically you can use GIMP to reduce the number of colours in the original picture by doing an indexed colour conversion to a pre-set number of colours. It takes a bit of trial and error to get some thing that is satisfactory. You may need to do a bit of clean up afterwards in KG Chart as well.

[spinuntilyoufall]

I know exactly what you mean! I've found that a lot of the time the fuzziness can be easily fixed by deleting some of the colors (usually the light greys) and then switching the rest over to black. So, for instance;

Here's the picture I'm going from -

Spoiler

When I pull it into KGChart, here it is with the wonky edges -

Spoiler

Now, sometimes, this actually looks BETTER, but you have a BUNCH of colors, or it just doesn't look right.

So, there are two ways that I will go about this.

The first, if I feel that it looks a little "thick" is to delete all the greys and that weird pink color it pulled in for no reason. Then I will change those top four colors all to 310 (black.) (Right click on a color in the "Selected" tab to change or delete it.) There's no set number of colors to change, but if it's only in the borders and you want your borders black, change it. (Also, there's that handy undo button - don't be afraid to experiment!) Then you get this look -

Spoiler

The second way, more for if it didn't pick up a lot of the black, is to convert all the greys to black instead of deleting them. This gives you a thicker border, looking like this -

Spoiler

Again, I've found that each pattern is different, and the best thing to do is just to play around with deleting / changing colors until you get what you want.

[wakamoochi]

Thanks guys.

@Servo, that's the post I went by to learn how to actually use KGChart It just didn't, or I didn't see, where it explained what I was talking about. Although I'll be the first to admit that I was doing a quick read by the time I got through the initial how-to.

@Spin, that helps to know that at least one person is doing it the same as I was. I just didn't know if there was some easier way to do it instead of just stabbing blindly. Everyone's patterns on here always look amazing, and I was hoping to make some half as good. I think I'll give my zombie Link another go.