Colour Palette

All instructions given in this guide are based on Corel Photo-Paint 8, although pictures for PSP are also shown (thanks Dan). Menu commands for other graphics programmes may vary.

There are two files that control Thief's 8-bit colour palette (all the textures/skins/objects in the "txt" folders, not "txt16"). These files are located in the pal.crf. Thief 1 / Gold has only Darkpal.pcx, whilst Thief 2 uses both Darkpal.pcx and Thiefpal.pcx. All of the files in question look like this:

By manipulating these two files you can alter how all 8-bit graphics look in the game.

Changing Individual Colours

If there is a colour (or two) that you wish to use, but it does not appear in the palette, you can replace it using the following method. Before you do so you must be certain that you do not want the colour you replace to be used within your mission. And remember the first colour within the palette is seen by DromEd as transparent and should only be used for that reason.

To change one or two colours, you need to edit the colour palette. This is done via Image->color table

This brings up the following options box

To change a colour, select it in the palette (right-hand side) and choose the replacement from the left-hand side.

In PSP, the palette editor looks like this...

...and requires you to choose the colour you wish to replace by double-clicking, to bring up the colour picker.

Remeber to save your altered palette in a "pal" folder in your Thief directory.

Changing the Entire Palette

The above method is great for changing the odd colour, but if you want to alter the entire palette (as I did in Ranstall Keep), there is a much quicker method - altering the hue, saturation and lightness levels.

Hue is the blend of RGB in each colour, Saturation is the degree of colour present, and lightness determines how light/dark each colour is.

As I want to remove all colour, I worked with the saturation. This is accessed via image->adjust->hue/saturation/lightness.

Corel window:

PSP window:

By lowering the saturation, the colour fades, whilst raising it causes an increase in vividness. To make the entire palette greyscale, set the saturation to -100.

It is also worth altering brightness/contrast, colour balance, tone curve, etc. until you end up with a palette which is to your liking. The advantage of doing the alterations in this manner is that it keeps the palette in order so you will not end up with messed-up looking graphics in the game.