MS Paint Problems

[TomGuycott]

Despite having access to Photoshop, I have a tendency to use MS Paint more often for arranging my sheets, ONLY because I'm a lazy crumudgeon who would rather work from the comfort and portability of his laptop than on the back-bending, too-short-of-a-desk desktop that happens to have Photoshop on it.

Now there is a small problem that I just baaaarely noticed before I even started to rip sprites, and that is, when copying graphics from one opened Paint window and pasting them onto another, sometimes there is corruption in the color palette. This tends to happen when one graphic has a much different color range than the other palette, and what results is the program attempting to adjust the sprite to make it closer to what I had in the first window in the first place, or so I assume, I don't actually know that to be fact.

Now up until now, that hasn't been much of a problem. Most of the sprites I've ripped have pretty much the same color scheme throughout the whole sheet, and whenever there were a lot more colors (and sometimes even when there weren't), I studied my sprites closely to make sure that I didn't muck anything up in that regard.

However, I've now reached a sheet where no matter how I do it, it'll still have that slight corruption in the color palette. I'm trying to sheet the bosses from Ninja Gaiden 2 and 3 from the SNES Ninja Gaiden Trilogy, and even after pasting on the 2nd boss, I see mild alterations in his colors, barely noticeable, but it's not the real colors. :<

Here's my questions: Is there a way to make Paint react the way I want it to and NOT do that? Is there a free downloadable program that is superior to Paint that won't give me this crap? Or should I stop being lazy, clean up my room and find my Photoshop CD and install it on my laptop if I can, despite it slowing it down considerably?

[Alpha Six]

Is your sheet already saved when you're constructing it? If so, is it in GIF format? If so, that could explain your color problems. Save as PNG; it supports 24-bit bitmap without jacking up the file size, something .bmp is notorious for.

[Kitsu]

It could be your file format. If you have different file formats open at the same time, they would obviously have different palettes. Switching to a 32-bit file format should get rid of the problem, seeing it doesn't actually use palettes at all anyway. Then, you can save it as something else later.

EDIT: ^^ What he said... ^^

[Gors]

well, it might be the way you're saving it. If you're saving in PNG, the colors are going to get darker and darker.

You could save the progress in BMP and convert it to PNG when the sheet is done. I think TIFs can retain the right palette too.

[TomGuycott]

Everything I work with is usually in PNG format. I should describe how I work just in case that it will bring some sort of important fact to light:

1. I open one of the saved PNG files, and I use this as the sheet, arranging whatever contents I plan to use on it, etc.

2. I open various other PNG files, Copy what I need from the newly opened file, and paste it on the main sheet.

When I paste, that is when I notice the color changing, usually only very slightly. It only seems to happen when there is greaaat differences in the color information. This is mainly problematic with the sheet I was trying to do for Ninja Gaiden, because most of the bosses have colors that differ from each other. :<

Should I be working in BMP or another format, and then save the final as PNG?

[Kitsu]

Yeah, probably. Try it and see if it works.

[TomGuycott]

Just as a warning in case anyone else has this problem, TIFF isn't the file format to try. xD I think the corruption in the palette was worse in that.

BMP on the other hand seemed to retain all the color data, though I didn't go beyond the point where I started to have problems with the PNGs. I appreciate the feedback, this one was making me want to smash my head into my keyboard. xD