Quake Skins Tutorial

Carl Kidwell
Chapter 11:
High Color Mode
Page 2

Well obviously the first thing your thinking is:

"well thats nice but I'm not going to be making a dayglow striped quake skin!".

I hope not anyways..

More likely you've picked out something you feel will be interesting, or "cool". Most popular for skin ideas are based on on of the following "techno", "horror", "id clones", "fantasy", and "camper" skins themes. Of course there are the few who break through and do something different but that is another issue altogether.

Now I have already laid out what some of the primary disadvantages to using highcolor mode are. I think its time to go ahead and admit that it does have advantages, and show them to you. Highcolor mode is not "evil", but it is not for the technically challenged either.

Examples of what Highcolor mode is good at!
(for all examples I am using PaintShop Pro v4.12)

HighColor image #1
Quake Palette image #2
HighColor converted to Quake Palette image #3

We see above in image #1 that I have used high color mode with the airbrush tool to create a line going from top to bottom. The very same settings with the airbrush, but using the Quake palette produces a very different result in image #2.

Finaly in image #3 we have loaded the Quake palette into our high color image and get a result in between. This final picture could be made to look even better with a few minutes time and some "by hand" touch ups.

So in summary we have learned here that highcolor mode is basically good at creating better shading, but that the conversion process causes us to lose quality sometimes.