Making Custom Textures (Adobe PhotoShop 4) ~ Saving Textures ~ Saving your new texture. Before you save a texture in Photoshop you have to convert the Image - Mode to Indexed Color. When you convert it, photoshop also creates an Indexed Palette to go along with the image. You have to save the Image File as filename.RAW and also save the palette as filename.ACT, keeping the filenames the same so that MTM2 knows which palette goes with what texture picture. I save the .RAW file first and the .ACT file immediately afterwards to make sure I keep them synchronized. You can have multiple images open at once, each with its own palette, but when you go to save the palette, it will be the one associated with the currently active image. You can save the palette first, just make sure it’s the one for the right image. If these two files get out of synch, your texture starts looking like one of those false color pictures of a brain scan hehe.
1. | Before saving your new texture, you need to convert it to Indexed Mode. From the menu, select Image > Mode > Indexed Color.
2. | The Indexed Color dialog box pops up. If you’re still with me to here you should set the options in this box to Palette : Adaptive Color Depth: 8 bit/pixel Colors: 256 Dither: Diffusion. Then press OK. Sometimes if you’ve fiddled with the picture a lot in RGB mode, some of the colors change when you do this since you are reducing down to only 256. If something doesn’t look right, just go back to RGB mode and tweak it again, then change back to Indexed color.
3. | Now that you have the texture you want, you need to pick a new filename. You probably want to keep part of the old name so you can remember what the base texture was, and so it will show up close to the base texture in the Traxx alphabetical listing you see when loading textures. If it’s a brand new texture, starting with a couple of letters from the track name you are working on seems to help me remember what it is.
CAUTION: Any time you edit textures, you must give the texture a unique file name when you save it, texture file name conflicts can screw up lots of things.
4. | Now you can save the file. Go to File > Save As, in the Save In: box, make sure your Traxx Art folder is selected, in the File Name box, enter the new name you picked and add the .RAW extension. (If you leave off the .RAW extension, Photoshop will add it the first time you try to save, then just hit Save again.) (Remember the filename because you’ll need it in the next step when you save the palette file.)
5. | When you click Save, you get the Raw Options dialog box. Leave everything the way it is and click OK. Then a Warning box from Photoshop comes up about losing image data with this format. Again, leave everything and click OK.
6. | Next you need to save the palette for the texture. From the menu select Image > Mode > Color Table.
7. | The Color Table pops up again, but now it only contains the colors you need for your custom texture. In the Color Table select the Save button. Now the Save dialog box pops up, prompting you for a file name. You must use the same filename here with the .ACT extension that you used in the previous step with the .RAW extension, and make sure the Save In: box is pointing to your Traxx Art folder.
8. | The texture and its palette should now be in the Traxx Art folder.
9. | Go to Traxx and see if you can load it and put it in you track.
Shortcut : Just as with loading textures into Photoshop, Traxx will help you save textures in the appropriate RAW and ACT file formats. First convert the image to 8 bit, indexed-color, then copy and paste into Traxx. 1. From the menu, select Image / Mode / Indexed Color. 2. The Indexed Color dialog box pops up. Set the options in this box to Palette : Adaptive Color Depth: 8 bit/pixel Colors: 256 Dither: Diffusion. Then press OK. 3. From the menu select Edit then Copy (Ctrl+C for short). 4. In Traxx, in the textures box, click the paste single button. 5. Type in a unique file name. That's it. Traxx has created the RAW and ACT files with the names you have given them, and has loaded the texture into the textures box too. For more information, please see the custom texture page in the mtmg Traxx Help pages.
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