MSPaint Color Transpose Technique
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: The Lounge
Forum Name: Resources and Support
Forum Discription: Help your fellow pixel artists out with links to good tutorials, other forums, software, fonts, etc. Bugs and support issues should go here as well.
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=13715
Printed Date: 29 April 2026 at 4:59am
Topic: MSPaint Color Transpose Technique
Posted By: Sylon
Subject: MSPaint Color Transpose Technique
Date Posted: 16 January 2012 at 8:34pm
I just discovered a way to drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to transpose an image's palette using MSPaint!
Why this is necessary or helpful? Read from the asterisk * below if you're curious.
To begin:
You don't necessarily need the image's palette, but it would help very much.
1. If you do have the image's palette, line up that one paralleling the new one so that you know which colors are supposed to be switched.
For example, if the original image has blacks, grays, and whites, and you want to switch it to a blue hue, parallel the palettes so that the blacks line up with the darkest blues, the whites line up with the brightest blues.
2. Make a big bright red background that can fit two copies of the image simultaneously (doesn't have to be red; just choose a VERY bright or VERY dark color that is CLEARLY not in the image).
3. Place your image completely on one side of that background.
4. Use the eyedropper tool and right-click the color in the image that you want to transpose. Use the eyedropper tool again to left-click the new color that will replace the old one.
5. Select the image and move it to the other side of the background. You will see the red or green (or whatever) background pop out through the spots in the image that contain the old color you right-clicked. Swoop in and place the new colors on those spots.
6. Using the background color, re-fill the old background space where the image used to be so that space is ready to be used again.
7. Repeat with step 4 for the next color this time, and so on.
* Why this is helpful or necessary:
There are image editors out there that transpose hues in simple
ways, but of course, not
everyone has such an editor anyway. If there are free editors out there
that do this, I don't have one.
Even if I did have an editor, I might not want to give the image a simple hue transposition. I might want a complex one using colors that the image editor wouldn't "understand". Or, if I wanted to transpose one band of color in the image to one hue, and another band of color to a different hue, it might be very difficult to select those bands of color using a free image editor (I believe it can be done in Photoshop!).
In my case, I use many many colors in my art...which makes it hard to transpose when I want to, because it can be difficult to see exactly which pixels contain which color...I have to use the paintbrush tool to measure up the new color against the old pixels and judge purely using my visual discernment as to which pixels are the right ones to transpose...it can be extremely straining and time-consuming. There are about one or two other ways of doing it I know about but they are just as time-consuming. This prompted me to get creative.
So, I hope this helps those who want to transpose!
Joe
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Replies:
Posted By: r1k
Date Posted: 17 January 2012 at 2:09pm
you can also use the eraser tool. left click the color you want to replace with eye dropper tool. make the right click color the color you want to replace it with. use the eraser by holding right click. all the left click colors it goes over are replaced with the right click color. hold ctrl+ to increase the eraser to the size of the image so you only have to click once with the eraser to do the whole image. though apperently windows 7 and vista paint stupidly limit the size of all the tools, but in xp paint you can increase the size of the eraser and other tools indeffinately.
but i think there may be free tools with better color swap ability. even gamemakers sprite editor has a color swap tool which only takes 1 click.
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Posted By: Sylon
Date Posted: 17 January 2012 at 6:26pm
Now I know why the universe assigned me to come to this forum with my so-called "technique". LOL.
Thanks for sharing! That is much, much better.
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Posted By: yrizoud
Date Posted: 18 January 2012 at 3:00am
This sounds like masochism. Even if you refuse to draw in anything but the different MSPaints, for this sort of tasks you should at least open the image in XNView for example and tweak the palette entries directly.
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Posted By: KittenMaster
Date Posted: 18 January 2012 at 6:31am
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It's situations like these as to why MS Paint users need to upgrade to at least Graphics Gale to give themselves a palette editor.
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