Changing the palette

I picked the palette for the hair so that the shading would be easy to see. But let's face it, it's not all that pretty for a hair palette.
You might get lucky and get the palette right in the first try. Personally I rarely do, I like adjusting the palette so it matches the base and the rest of the doll so I always end up changing the palette at this point.
Here's how to do it in Gimp:

On the 'palettes' layer, draw the new palette you are gonna use and line it up with the old one. It should be easy to see which colors correspond from palette to palette.

Grab the old color selection tool and go to the 'hair' layer. Now if you tick off the 'sample merged' option you will be able to pick a color from any layer and it will be selected on the active layer only. How cool is that?
Click the first color of the old pink palette. Notice how the corresponding areas of the hair is selected. Now get the color picker and click the matching color on the new black palette. A window will pop up but just ignore it - it will go away when you get the flood fill bucket. With the bucket click inside the selection and the color is changed.


Repeat this step with every color in the palette; select the color from the old palette -> pick the matching color from the new palette -> flood fill the selection with the new color.

When you're done the doll looks like this:


Now hide the palette layer, create a background layer with a color you didn't use on the doll and flatten the image. Then convert the image to indexed colors (no color dithering) and add an alpha channel. Use the color selection tool to select all background pixels and CTRL+K to delete them. Save your image as a gif and you're ready. (For a more thorough explanation of this step see my Gimp doll tutorial.



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