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Full Color Tattoos
in Black & White
In Black and White you are allowed to put tattoos on your creature. This is
a very cool way to individualize him (wonder why there are to obvious female
creatures..hmmm..). In the readme that comes with the game, there are some basic
instructions as to how to create tattoos and how to apply them.
This tutorial assumes you are enough of a genius to read and understand the
readme file. You will also need and be able to use Paint Shop Pro (or photoshop
if you have that but screens will be presented as they are in PSP). MSPaint
will NOT suffice for making these full color tattoos. It simply doesn't
have what it takes. Download a demo of PSP at www.jasc.com.
Buy it. Its worth it. If you want to see the end results, scroll all the way
to the end and look at the screen shots. I think you will agree the results
are well worth the effort you will put out.
The basic premise here is to take a full color image and split it into multiple tattoos that you then apply on top of each other in B&W. Pretty simple concept but it limits the number of tattoos you can have on your creature since B&W limits the tattoo count to 5 (as far as I can tell). If you are NOT working from full color images or photos, DocTiki has a good tutorial on creating some from scratch which is simpler than the method I have below which is oriented to handling photographic tattoos.
Ok, lets get started...(I assume you have a picture you will want to put on your creature already selected) You will need to have the image cleaned up and sized down to 64x64 pixels..STILL in full color. Make it with a black background as seen below. If you want to work along.. you can download the ZIP that has all the images here.
Open the Swisse Army Knife
of image editors!
Open the full color image up in PSP. Here is the one we will be working
from, our lovely woman (sit down all you perverts..she's 18
AND she's in a bathing suit for heaven's sake):
Ok, using the magic wand selector, grab the black background:
Using the shortcut keys CTL-SHIFT-I, Invert the selection so you have only the
subject, in this case the woman. Now paint it (her) completely WHITE. Full WHITE,
as seen below. Save this image out as your MASK.
 Mask |
Now we need to tweek the original image a bit so that it displays correctly
in B&W.
Reload the original image (64x64 full color) or if you didn't close the MASK
image, use the UNDO buffer to get back to before you painted it white. Now tweek
the RGB levels of the image using the "Adjust RGB" tool in PSP:
As you can see this is darkening the image considerably. This is the intent.
You need this darkening before you split the channels so that B&W will overlay
them properly.
Now, use the "Split Channels RGB" command to seperate the image into
seperate Red, Blue and Green images. They will all appear in greyscale which
is exactly what you want. Save each channel out to a seperate file (I usually
append an R, G or B to the original filename).
 Red |
 Green |
 Blue |
Once you have the three saved, close
them and return to the orignal image. Use the UNDO buffer to undo the RGB adjustment
and get back to the original image. This time we need to jack up the brightness
and contrast of the image:
This sorta washes the image out and brightens it up considerably. Convert the
image to greyscale and save out the grey image. This grey image will be the
one you use as your player symbol.
 Greyscale |
Almost done in PSP..one more stage
to go through. Now you need a highlight file. This isn't actually required but
it does make the tattoo look better.
Use UNDO to undo the convert to greyscale. Leave the Brightness/Contrast adjustment
in place. Negative the image and you shold get something like this:
 Color Negative |
Now do a Split Channel CMYK:
 Cyan |
 Magenta |
 Yellow |
 Black |
The one you are intrested in is the
BLACK channel, you can discard all the others. The black channel will actually
be a white or lightly colored highlight layer.
So here is what you should have on
your drive:
Red |
Green |
Blue |
Black |
Mask |
Greyscale |
To the Batmobile Robin!
Load up DarkFame's Tatto Manager and load the 6 images into tattoo slots for
use in Black and White. Load them in an order that makes sense to you so that
you will remember what they are inside B&W since (unfortunately) there are
no filenames inside B&W to use for reference. YOU can put them in ANY order
you want to but here is how I did it:
Shades of Color!
Now is the time for all good comrads...never mind..typing class flashback. Now
is the time to fire up Black and White and enter the creature cave. Here comes
the fun of putting each layer of the tattoo in place. Put them on in the order
of MASK, BLUE,
GREEN, RED,
and finally HIGHLIGHT. I tried other orders
but they didn't turn out as well with this image. You may need to alter their
order depending on the look of your image. So far for all images involving people
(faces, bodies, hands etc), this order seems best. Take a look at the following
images to get a good idea of the color settings for each layer:
First to go on is the MASK image.
Apply it in BLACK:
Now Apply the BLUE layer in a pastel blue:
Then apply the GREEN layer in a pastel green:
And finally, apply the RED layer and a washed out red color:
If you made a highlight layer, apply it in a color that makes sense for the
tattoo, in this case, a near flesh tone:
Don't be fooled by the look of the tattoo in the creature cave. The lighting
in the cave is quite different from the color of the lights outside in the daylight.
Here is a portion of a screenshot showing the tiger with his "Babe"
tattoo applied as above. Notice how the colors look different out here in the
daylight than in the red tinted lighting inside the creature cave. I put the
original full color image into the shot so you can compare:
Here is another snip from a screenshot showing the greyscale being used for
player symbol, again with an inset of the original image for comparison:
And finally, here is a clip from the intro animation (the flying black and white
dots) showing this symbol:
