I'm trying to draw sprites for my 16-bit color game using Adobe Photoshop, and I'm having some difficulties. Most of the Photoshop tools seem to cause transparency effects around the area I'm drawing, so when the graphics are imported, there are always these white artifacts around the sprite. Does anyone know how to turn these transparency effects off entirely? Are there any good tutorials for drawing sprites? Also, are there any other art programs any of you guys think would be more appropriate? Thanks!
There are lots of tutorials for drawing sprites. Go to the tutorial thread of the critics lounge and check them out.
you need to turn the anti alias off, use a pen rather than paint brushes, resizing things also does the halo effect around sprites, my last 2 games where cursed with it! use layers and draw the objects to scale using the game background to work from
More suggestions: Use the pencil tool, and modify the image's colour table to exclude all but the colours you'll actually be using.
Also, when using the eraser, make sure it's set to "Pencil" or "Block" and at 100% opacity, so that it doesn't erase and leave transparent areas.
Don't forget to turn off anti-alias when using the magic wand too. :)
When you work with sprites or anything pixel-perfect, in the Edit -> Preferences -> General, turn the interpolation to 'nearest neighbor'. This minimizes the anti-aliasing in places where it can not be turned OFF locally. And don't forget to change it back to 'Bicubic' when you start working with anti-alias again.
JustG's suggestion on definite palette also works but might he hard if you haven't yet figured out completely what kind of colors you'll be using. I think.