Well it’s hard to compete with the wonder of the DT 4.12 update, but here I go anyway.
It’s comforting to know that the DT members do take notice of the things we write here, case in point I received a PM from the team explaining that to get better indexing results the tool of choice is Bright (available from the simmer's paintshop) and supplied me with a link to Hs129B2 default skin that had been indexed using this tool.
The results are greatly superior to anything obtainable through Photoshop or Gimp and while by no means a true substitute for a skin that has a 16bit or 24bit RGB colour depth, but unless you know what you are looking for it is quite hard to pickup the differnces in this particular case.
Default skin for Hs129B2, native in-game RGB.
Same skin extracted then reduced to 256 index (8bit) using Bright (via the default settings of Brighter). :]
And the same skin reduced to 256 index (8bit) through Photoshop CS5.
But the above is thus far not without its problems: I keep my edited stuff separate from my working files and so I have installed all my extraction, indexing, etc. tools on to my portable drive along with a copy of Il2-46. While this all works perfectly well on my work PC (Win 7 Pro 64) the same can’t be said for my home PC (Win 7 Pro 64). On my home PC when I try to fire up Brighter from either the Portable or even fixed drives I get the following error:
Now it would appear to be associated with one of the following (and it doing my head in big time) active x control, visual basic, administrator rights????
Running brighter as an administrator gets Brighter to start, but it then errors when you try to run it, say it can’t find bright?
Any tips would be more than welcome as it’s a tad hard for me to do my customs at work