background removal help

[MinusDaPony]

I've been ripping for a long time and the process of deleting the background from a sprite (actual background, not a block colour) is what uses up 90% of my time. After all these years, there must be a program out there that I can give a specific set of colours to, a palette, and have it remove all colours that are not in that palette from an image.

That is what I need to get my sheets into a usable state. I've not uploaded a single one as I lose motivation before finishing. The backgrounds are killing me...

But you'll be getting my Guardian Heroes, Unlosing Ranger, Vandal Hearts, or whatever else sheets. Some of the sheets are depressingly over 10 years old. Any help you guys can give on finally letting me complete these sheets would be great. Thank you.

PS: Is there a program that can detect when an image is stretched, and shrink it? Again that feels like it'd be incredibly easy to make, and should have been made several times over by now. No searching has given me results for either program though.

[Ploaj]

I could make a program for the background palette removal thing no problem if you give me an example. (image with background to remove and image with palette to not remove)

Depending on what system those games are for, there may be much easier ways to rip from them than screen shots. The Unlosing Ranger one looks to be a psp games, which might mean you can look through the file system and maybe extract the graphics from the files.

Detecting if an image is stretched is probably possible through some algorithms, but shrinking it correctly is more than likely a no go.

[redblueyellow]

Have you tried Puggsoy's Background Remover program? I haven't personally tried it, but it might be worth looking into:

http://www.vg-resource.com/thread-21700.html

[MinusDaPony]

I could make a program for the background palette removal thing no problem if you give me an example. (image with background to remove and image with palette to not remove)

Depending on what system those games are for, there may be much easier ways to rip from them than screen shots. The Unlosing Ranger one looks to be a psp games, which might mean you can look through the file system and maybe extract the graphics from the files.

Detecting if an image is stretched is probably possible through some algorithms, but shrinking it correctly is more than likely a no go.

I'd have thought that you could make a program to detect when a line of data is repeated, and then simply delete the repeated line. But I doesn't surprise me it's probably hard than that.
Uploading a picture of the sheet as it was this morning. I had been removing the BG by individually selecting a colour from it and then replacing that colour with green. On BGs this detailed that method just doesn't work... Also christ image upload sites have gone to hell! Imageshack, Minus, Photobucket was always bad. Postimage I just discovered, and that's awful. Even Tinypic has betrayed me. What is the world coming to. I guess I can still upload it as an attachment... And damn did it take a while to get it under 500kb. It has a single clean sprite with the palette next to it.

Have you tried Puggsoy's Background Remover program? I haven't personally tried it, but it might be worth looking into:

http://www.vg-resource.com/thread-21700.html

Sadly that BG remover is useless to me. It'd be too much effort to get a clean BG sprite for that.

[daemoth]

Depending on the console it can be pretty easy to get the sprite from the ram, so they arent streched and without background.
For example, Unlosing Ranger, a psp game, can be ripped with using glintercept. If you need help using it, i can explain. 
Also, check this thread for other consoles.

[MinusDaPony]

The sprites currently uploaded here made me think these other sprites are unobtainable that way. But looking at an old thread, someone was able to rip these sprites, but simply never finished the job... So Damn, I could've been ripping them the easier way after all. I guess It's about time I gave up on the old ways. Thanks for the help. Probably gonna struggle loads with these programs though knowing me.

[MinusDaPony]

Okay it took me a long time, and in the end, I got nothing. After a painful amount of decompression I can't get a single sprite to show up using NSUnpack, NISDecmp, and TiledGGD. Nothing but a mess of a pixels comes up for any file.
Rereading the old thread, it's also very likely that these sprites are all in pieces. Like I could rip a character's arm, seperate from the body. Which is barely usable at all.

I could make a program for the background palette removal thing no problem if you give me an example. (image with background to remove and image with palette to not remove)

So back to the old fashioned way. I have got some really good sheets forming here. But a background remover is still something I desperately need. The resizing is something I am used to doing manually, so I can do that without a tool. And as for fixing sprites that have effects layered on them, I am used to that too. Heck, I just resprited one of these pixel by pixel because it had been turned 45c. (And then found a usuable version of it a few minutes later...) Just can't deal with these backgrounds. Never had to deal with more than a simple BG before. All the help you can give will be hugely appreciated!

[Daxar]

Most image editors worth their salt should be able to do this quite easily already.




^^ Took me 15 seconds in GIMP. Start by selecting by color the colors you want to keep, invert selection, delete, done. Can be touched up manually afterwards if need be (such as the frames where there are particle effects in front of the character here, which messes up the palettized selection).

(Also use Imgur nowadays for image hosting, other places suck as you noted)

That aside, ask and you shall receive. Here's a program that I made that can take multiple input images at a time and cut out the background.