Matching TF to Elements (Tutorial) (Patreon)

Hello! Today's post is something different. This is something that a lot of people have asked me about ever since I released the Elements set-- so I decided to finally put this together.

Today's post is available for everybody to view and not limited to patrons. This will hopefully be helpful to everybody who is making use of my Elements assets.

UPDATE: New tutorial: if you want to go the other direction:

Matching Elements to Time Fantasy Tutorial

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The big problem with the original Time Fantasy series is that they use a unique muted color palette which makes it difficult to mix them with other assets. That includes my new Elements series (the character sprites and the upcoming Elements tilesets); the classic Time Fantasy tiles stand out awkwardly.

Here's an example of a map that I quickly put together. You can immediately see the difference between the newer full-contrast Elements cave tiles and the lighter Time Fantasy dungeon tiles:

Today I am going to share with you the quick way that I recolor the Time Fantasy pieces to fit alongside full-color assets.

Of course, you'll always get the best results if you manually choose colors, but when we have a big set or a huge library to work with, we're going to make use of the tools available to us.

Note: I'm using Adobe Photoshop for this, but there are plenty of other alternatives that have similar features. When we get into specific numbers, it might be different depending on the software you use, so you'll have to trust your eyes when adjusting value sliders.

First off, we start with the original Time Fantasy set:

But before that-- the first step is the simplest. We want to take the darkest color on the original set and replace it with pure black (#000000).

There's a bunch of ways to do that-- for me using Photoshop, the fastest way is to use the paint bucket with zero tolerance and contiguous unchecked.

Now that the darkest color has been replaced with true black, we're able to work with the full range of colors. So the next step is to increase the contrast.

In Photoshop, I find that 44 works well.

After the contrast has been increased a bit, the next step is to shift the overall contrast just a little bit so that it looks more natural against the new pure black. This is pretty simple:

In Photoshop, I'll use the levels option and bring the first slider up until 12. It's a subtle bump-- you don't want to push it too far.

At this point, the contrast and depth has been improved enough so your image can generally mix in with other full-colored assets without looking out of place.

If you're not going to be mixing tiles directly, then you can stop here. At this point, the newly-recolored tilesets should look correct with the Elements character sprites.

Let's take that original sample map from the beginning of this post and plug in the new recolored set:

The color range makes more sense here. Of course, the obvious problem in this specific case is that the floor tiles are a different tone entirely.

You might run into issues like this when trying to mix-and-match different tilesets.

In these situations, it's best to do some manual recoloring. When you're matching colors like this, it's really easy, because you can pull colors directly from the set that you're matching to.

Here's a .gif that I recorded as an example. The only thing that I'm doing here is selecting colors with the eyedropper and using it to replace the colors of the terrain:

One cool thing that I've noticed is that a lot of textures will blend together fine if they have the same colors. This is particularly true for natural-style ground textures that make use of subtle contrast. Not every combination will work of course; but it can't hurt to experiment.

You can see it here in the updated map example:

And lastly, the final example with Elements-style sprites in-game:

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Okay, that's it for now. Let me know if you want to see more tutorials like this in the future.

I'll be back next week and we'll get back to the normal releases-- I'll be here with something new from the request thread.

See you then. Thanks!