Edit NCGR while keeping the same amount of colors in the palette

[YuseiFD]

Hello, i am having a hard time editing a picture, i used photopea and paint.net, added black text and gave it shadow, the palette hasn't changed that much, but every time i try to import using Tinke, it claims the picture has more colors than the maximum amount, what can i do please ?

What is the best tool to use for this please.

Spoiler: Original picture vs modified

VS

 

[FAST6191]

Editing things using image editors is fraught with difficulty, though I would rather do that effect with layers rather than manually, shadows and blur effects possibly being another.

I have had some success with crystaltile2. It has the option to export and import image formats (do BMP or PNG), and if you are sensible and either restrict the palette (gimp calls it indexed mode) or colour pick when you are there and steer clear or gradients, blur, paintbrush effects (or always use hard edge), anti aliasing and anything else that generates excessive amounts of colours. You might also be able to crush you image down to those colours you do have using such a tool.
It is not always that obvious but for a general workflow open the ROM up, click on the little DS icon to the right of the main toolbar to bring up the list of DS files (hopefully it is just there, preferably not compressed but it can sort that if needs be/you can sort it manually, and not contained in a sub archive it does not understand). Right click on the file you are interested in and it will then give options to load it, do the same for the palette files if you think you want one and hopefully it is not too tile mapped either (though again you might be able to work around that).
From there the image viewer should be there and in all the right modes. Select what you want to edit and in one of the downdown menus should be various export options.
https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/818/
https://gbatemp.net/download/crystaltile2.23649/

 

[YuseiFD]

Editing things using image editors is fraught with difficulty, though I would rather do that effect with layers rather than manually, shadows and blur effects possibly being another.

I have had some success with crystaltile2. It has the option to export and import image formats (do BMP or PNG), and if you are sensible and either restrict the palette (gimp calls it indexed mode) or colour pick when you are there and steer clear or gradients, blur, paintbrush effects (or always use hard edge), anti aliasing and anything else that generates excessive amounts of colours. You might also be able to crush you image down to those colours you do have using such a tool.
It is not always that obvious but for a general workflow open the ROM up, click on the little DS icon to the right of the main toolbar to bring up the list of DS files (hopefully it is just there, preferably not compressed but it can sort that if needs be/you can sort it manually, and not contained in a sub archive it does not understand). Right click on the file you are interested in and it will then give options to load it, do the same for the palette files if you think you want one and hopefully it is not too tile mapped either (though again you might be able to work around that).
From there the image viewer should be there and in all the right modes. Select what you want to edit and in one of the downdown menus should be various export options.
https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/818/
https://gbatemp.net/download/crystaltile2.23649/

Thank you for your reply, i already tried but it's too tile mapped, plus checking the source for Tinke, it does the same job and on top of that it loads the NCER which maps the NCGR graphic and shows it properly, but the question that remains, is what can i use to make sure i don't exceed the allowed color palette maximum value of colors. You mentioned GIMP and indexed mode, is that a feature i can use on other editors ??

 

[FAST6191]

Limited colours is very old school web and computer graphics so equivalents probably exist in many things, and you can fake it (gradients, anti aliasing, brush effects and colour tweak options... don't use any of them) in most things. What the hard limiting options might be in other programs I don't know offhand though indexed is likely a good search term and not a non standard one gimp or photoshop make up or call something else to confuse matters.
That said if you are only crushing colours down do you need another program?

 

[YuseiFD]

Limited colours is very old school web and computer graphics so equivalents probably exist in many things, and you can fake it (gradients, anti aliasing, brush effects and colour tweak options... don't use any of them) in most things. What the hard limiting options might be in other programs I don't know offhand though indexed is likely a good search term and not a non standard one gimp or photoshop make up or call something else to confuse matters.
That said if you are only crushing colours down do you need another program?

Thank you again for clarifying, as you can see in the OPs spoiler, i used the same colors, no special effects other than shadows which are already used in the original, but this makes 188 unique colors in the image which is completely odd, but i think i'm gonna leave it for now

 

[FAST6191]

Cranking up the zoom from the image in the opening post that looks like anti aliasing which can produce that high a count, similarly crushing it to 16 colours (still looks fine by the way) and doing a difference blend shows some stuff as well which would not be the case were it limited colours as a base. Now it is possible the forum messed something up in the process (they do appear to be PNG so not like the JPG it lowers quality for).

What game is it by the way?

 

[YuseiFD]

Cranking up the zoom from the image in the opening post that looks like anti aliasing which can produce that high a count, similarly crushing it to 16 colours (still looks fine by the way) and doing a difference blend shows some stuff as well which would not be the case were it limited colours as a base. Now it is possible the forum messed something up in the process (they do appear to be PNG so not like the JPG it lowers quality for).

What game is it by the way?

Captain tsubasa: New kick off

JPG sadly doesn't hold transparency, and i don't want to mess with size since Tinke is kinda sensetive to it when importing, but you were right, i am trying to replicate the original font and shadow effect as much as i can

 

[FAST6191]

I might give it a look a bit later.

I usually do shadows by replicating the top layer, altering colours to be whatever you need and shuffling the lower presumably now grey layer a few pixels out. In the case of the Nintendo on the original they might have also selected the text, increased the size by a pixel or two and then done the same as the previous sentence, maybe a blur as well to soften it a bit.

 

[YuseiFD]

I might give it a look a bit later.

I usually do shadows by replicating the top layer, altering colours to be whatever you need and shuffling the lower presumably now grey layer a few pixels out. In the case of the Nintendo on the original they might have also selected the text, increased the size by a pixel or two and then done the same as the previous sentence, maybe a blur as well to soften it a bit.

Yeah i actually managed to find out, thanks to a friend of mine in the scene, that using aseprite can help saving the png as indexed