Palette Matching

Any tips on matching palettes for different characters would be great.
Any time I want to import different characters into the game, each having their own color palette, everyone else's get messed up.
Is there any way to find a common ground palette for all the characters in that palette number or is it just trial and error? Also if you find a palette that works is there a better/faster way of inputting the palette to each character. I'm currently using graphics gale for my sprite editing and it's tedious to go change each color one at a time.

hope this made sense and thanks in advance.

Use the Gimp. Somewhere under the colors tap is Color Map. This is how you organize your palette. Ultimately, no recoloring is ever really needed with this technique.

"This is how you organize your palette. Ultimately, no recoloring is ever really needed with this technique. "


hmm, interesting. care to unpack that more? because no recoloring would be very nice.

This isn't relevant to palette matching other than you'll need to do this to get Color Map working.
1. In the GIMP, drag and drop your sprite/image to the blank window.
2. Click: "Image> Mode> Indexed". (If it's already indexed, switch it to RGB then back to Indexed.
3. Once you see the window below open, reduce the "Maximum number of colors" from 255 to 16 (or however many you want).


Above is copy and pasted from an old post.
I currently don't have it installed, and don't entirely want to hold anyone's hand through the process right now so I'll explain it best I can by memory. Click the Colors tab in The Gimp, go down to colorsmap and click something like arrange or manage. It'll open up you palette that your sprite is using. Next, drag and drop the colors so they look similar to what another sprites palette should look like. Essentially, you're matching the palettes of both sprites best you can so they're both corresponding to the same palette.

awesome, thanks for the input. i can play with it from here.

here's a related question, how does one know which characters to set to share palettes. \I see people who are making hacks, showing which characters they are using and which palettes they will be sharing. For instance, in Zeemis' ffiv hack (which i look forward too) i believe he has tella/rosa/edward (going from memory) all in one palette. Is that done via trial and error, or is there some planning and thought or a trick done to decide that?

There are threads around here (can't remember which ones) in which this question has been answered a few times now...

For what I can remember, Mog and Umaro share one palette; Strago, Relm and Kefka share another; and so on. There's a list in one of the threads somewhere.

Others might be able to help better here