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Primary Colors
Traditional art uses red, yellow, and blue as primary colors, computers use red, green, and blue. There are also three secondary colors created by mixing two primary colors together; orange, green, and violet in traditional art, and yellow, cyan (sky blue), and magenta (pink) in computers. Red, yellow, and blue are the primary colors of pigment, red, green and blue are the primary colors of light.
A mnemonic for the six primary and secondary colors of pigment is ROYGBV [roy-gee-biv], which stands for red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. The computer equivalent would be RYGCBM [ryh-gic-bim], which stands for red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and magenta.
Photoshop
PSP uses the more common method of using the values 0 - 255 for all of six fields, HSLRGB. Results may vary when using Photoshop. PS uses HSB (hue, saturation, and bright) instead of HSL for choosing colors. The value of a hue ranges from 0 - 360 instead of 0 - 255. The table for the hues is a bit different as well:
| Hue |
Name |
Color |
| 0 |
Red |
|
| 60 |
Yellow |
|
| 120 |
Green |
|
| 180 |
Cyan |
|
| 240 |
Blue |
|
| 300 |
Magenta |
|
Saturation and brightness are adjusted with percent sliders instead of numerical values. The tables are different as well:
| Saturation |
Color |
| 0% |
|
| 20% |
|
| 40% |
|
| 60% |
|
| 80% |
|
| 100% |
|
| Brightness |
Color |
| 0% |
|
| 20% |
|
| 40% |
|
| 60% |
|
| 80% |
|
| 100% |
|
Fortunately, RGB still use 0 - 255 as their values.
Preferred Technique
Personally, I prefer the modified gray technique. It's the fastest and simplest, and yields good results most of the time. It takes a while to get used to choosing the correct color to use on the top layer, but the results are great at avoiding colors that are too dark or neon, which can happen a lot when just eyeballing. Of course, you won't always be able to get the just the right color with only one technique alone. I usually end up messing with the opacity and eyeballing techniques as a final step before releasing a sprite for mass production.
This is the completed sprite and it's color palette. The palette was created first using the modified gray technique, and the sprite was drawn all on one layer.
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