Sprite Issues..need resolving

Hey guys, well I've been away from the forums awhile now, and been learning ALOT lately for my hack..it's not bad at all. But one thing that's bugging me is I'm having an insane amount of trouble finding sprites, converting them to PNG and then them all staying at the correct size without having more than 16 colors. It's really frustrating, but here I'll give an example:

I wish to transport Bio Soldier from FFV (c'mon that guy is SICK) and replace Mega Armor with it. I went online and found two good sites for FFV Sprites:

http://shrines.rpgclassics.com/snes/ff5/enemies.shtml
http://www.videogamesprites.net/FinalFan...anoid.html

However, whenever I download them, they'res ALWAYS an issue. For the first link I gave, there's a black background around every sprite, which makes it more than 16 colors. Not to mention they're all GIF's so I have to convert them to PNG. After that, if I'm luck enough to get that far, I resize them using MS Paint to 64x64 (might be too big, just tell me) and either 1 of 2 things happen:
The image constrains "proportions" and turns out all skeletal looking OR
the image is cut off from an entire section.
So that's pretty much my issue. I've used Google Images sprites but same luck. I've only gotten lucky twice so far and that was with a wing raptor sprite and a crystal sprite to replace tritoch.
I really don't know what the deal is, and spriting isn't much my strong point but I'm sure peeps like Poco Loco or Michelle might know so yeah that's why I chose this forum ha. But yea just tell me if those are bad sites or if I'm doing my steps wrong.
I'm using FF3SE to import the sprites btw.
Thanks!
xJCSx

try and use photo shop or irfanview

if anything send me the sprites and I'll fix them 4 u

send me a pm

If you -really- can't get ahold of a decent program and all you have is MSPaint, there is one- thing that sort of, kind of works.

In the newer versions of MSPaint, you can zoom in and out of an image at a few different levels. Try zooming out of the image once (it'll be 50% smaller, but depending on the size of the original, this might be okay), and then just hit Shift+PrintScreen to copy the whole screen. Zoom back to 100% and then hit paste. You'll now have a full view of your screen pasted into Paint. Just crop around the 50% zoomed image and you'll have a 50%-sized sprite.

Again, this sucks, but if you can't get a decent program, it might work for you.

As for the black background causing too much color information, you should really just replace that with a bright red, green, or purple manually (so that you don't lose your black outline color when you add a transparency). If there's still too many extra colors (doubtful, I suspect that the gif's black BG just warped itself into two or more shades of 'black'), then just find two similar-looking colors in your actual sprite and make them the same color.

You can use Gimp, Photoshop, or irfanview to do all of this without having to manually color things. But if you're stuck using Paint for all of it, then you have a lot of manual coloring in your future.