inverting colors

[Waldemar Kurtz]

I used the stock Fokker E.III skins from OBD Software to cut-and-paste my way into a camoflage Fokker Eindecker. if the color wasn't quite what I wanted I would change the gamma or brightness on specific color ranges to get the variations that I wanted (red, blue, green for MS Paint). then using cut-and-paste on the transparent settings (so I don't over-write all the adjacent skin with white block) I got the camo-Fokkers here.

 

not very historically accurate, but lots of fun to make. then I thought "what if I invert all of the colors?". check it out... the highlights get turned into shadows and the shadows become highlights: which is a bit of a nuisance!

 

so if you're having trouble getting the right colors you want-- you might be able to 'invert' the color of an existing skin to help you get closer to the right look.

 

the Albatros fuselage skins with their plywood finishes become a nice blue-ish color. the plain linen wings of early SPADs, BE2s, and Nieuports becomes a dark medium blue (looks cool-- obviously NEVER gonna get used for the Brits, but for a French pilot, it might work out well). the Pfalz D.IIIa skins become an even darker version of gray (and it looks cool, but you obviously need to alter the instrument panels and the detail-work to keep it from looking too alien!

 

once you've inverted the colors there is still the matter of turning those high-lights back into shadows... and unfortunately I don't have the programs to do that with yet. (just Paint and the MS Photo Editor, so that sort of thing would take a long time). but if you play around you can still come up with some interesting material with the bare-bones software that comes with Windows.

[hairyspin]

You could give Paint.NET a try - it's freeware. www.getpaint.net/download.html

[Waldemar Kurtz]

thanks for the link. I've tried it out this morning and thus far it helps out a lot. I can probably crank out skin variations 10 times faster with this tool.