Palettes and hue shifting. These two simple things are absolutely necessary for making your skins look professional. Would you believe, then, that most skinners have no idea how to do these? Well, it's time for that to change. In this blog, I will be teaching you the basics of creating palettes and hue shifting. I will be using MCSkin3D for my examples, but the concepts can still apply if you are using programs like Paint.NET, GIMP Photoshop. If you are using a browser-based skin creators like MNCS, Skincraft, etc, I HIGHLY recommend upgrading to MCSkin3D. Anyway, onto our first topic: palettes.

Palettes
To put it very simply, palettes are 'lists' of colors that you will be using for coloring and shading your skins (see an example here). Effective palettes will greatly enhance the color harmony and shading depth of your skins, so knowing how to create them is extremely important. To begin to craft your palette, you should select a base color and then go to the HSVA tab of the MCSkin3D color wheel gui:


Here, I've selected a base color with a hue (H) of 0, a saturation (S) of 80 and a value (V) of 80. To put it simply, hue is the color, saturation is the amount of white in that color, and value is the amount of black in that color. Now, I will begin to create my palette of shades and highlights around that base color.

There are many ways to create your palette, and I will demonstrate them. First, I will show what a palette looks like if you ONLY adjust the value:

Here, you can see what shading using ONLY differences in value looks like, with the palette I used on the left. As you can see, the shadows look alright but the highlights look oddly bright and saturated. Additionally, things shaded this way tend to look 'dirty' or like they've been 'smudged with charcoal'. Clearly, we need another way to shade.

Next, I will show you what a palette looks like if you ONLY adjust the saturation level:

This one looks odd as well. The shadows look flat, and the whole thing looks very unnatural.

Interestingly, while these two examples use the exact same base color, the differences in palette create very different effects. While these might be useful in certain limited circumstances, to create natural shading we need to move on to the next step: combining saturation and value adjustments.

In this palette, I have adjusted BOTH the saturation and value. Specifically, the shadows have had their value adjusted higher (a higher number) and their saturated adjusted lower (a lower number), while the highlights have had their value adjusted lower and their saturation adjusted higher. To put that in different words, the shadows are more saturated and darker, while the highlights are less saturated and lighter. Here's what the end product looks like:

Ah, now that looks better. The shadows have depth, and the highlights are not oddly bright. By combining both changes in value and saturation, you can create palettes that will produce realistic shading.

Hue Shifting
Now that you understand what value and saturation are, it's time to move onto the next topic: hue shifting. If you're like me, you're looking at the last palette example and thinking: 'While that looks nice and all, isn't it still a bit bland and boring?' Well, you'd be right. The examples given thus far have had no adjustments made to their hue. To put it another way, we've been adjusting the value and saturation, but haven't yet touched the hue slider. To make good palettes, though, it's important that we explore what hue can do.

In this example, I have adjusted value, saturation AND hue. Specifically, I have shades get more purple as they get darker, and more orange as they get lighter.

This palette is the best yet. It has depth like the previous one, and the hue shifting makes the color look much less bland and boring. When creating your palettes, you should strive to integrate changes in value, saturation and hue.

Knowing how to hue shift colors requires a basic understanding of the color wheel. To illustrate this, I have created examples of hue shifting for multiple colors as a guide. These aren't by any means perfect, but they will illustrate how to hue shift each color.


Red: If your base is red, colors should get more magenta (purple) as they get darker and more orange as they get lighter

Orange: If your base is orange, colors should get redder as they get darker and yellower as they get lighter.

Yellow: If your base is yellow, colors should get more orange as they get darker. Colors should not get green as they get lighter, though. Instead, they should get purer yellow.

Green: If your base is green, colors should get more cyan (blue) as they get darker and more yellow as they get lighter.

Cyan (light blue): If your base is cyan, colors should get more blue as they get darker and more green as they get lighter.

Blue: If your base color is blue, colors should get more violet as they get darker and more cyan as they get lighter.

Magenta (purple): If your base color is magenta, colors should get more violet as they get darker and more red as they get lighter.

REMINDER: These are very basic guidelines to hue shifting, and it's quite possible to use other colors than those listed above. For example, if I was making a skin that was predominantly blue, green and yellow, I would hue shift the yellow towards green (instead of what's listed above, orange). Keep things like color harmony in mind when deciding how to hue shift.

As mentioned previously, this is by no means a perfect example. For instance, I still have not found an effective way to hue shift brown tones. That being said, an understanding of hue shifting is very important to making professional-looking skins.

Conclusion
Spending time and putting effort into creating your palettes is one of the best ways to ensure your skin turns out well. The best palettes include adjustments in value, saturation and hue. While this might seem like a lot of effort, with practice it becomes very easy to create basic palettes that fulfill all these requirements. With practice, too, you will learn how to create specific effects using these techniques. For example, skins with a high degree of saturation and hue-shifting will look cartoon-y, while skins with lower saturation and lighter hue shifting will look more natural. Experimenting with creating different palettes is a great way to increase your skinning skill.