Top left: good quality photograph that I'm going to edit to have it fit in with a klassic MK3 background. The entire point of this is to not just reduce the size of the photo and paste it into the arena, but to also reduce the total amount of colors that are in the image. This has to be done in order for it to look pixelated, as MK sprites and background use a limited amount of different colors. If you only downsize the image, the small version will still contain hundreds of different color pixels.
Top right: I first extract the girls out of the background here, as I'm only interested in using the people in the image, and not the sand that surrounds them. This is done manually, as Paint does not have an option to select individual portions of an image. You could reduce the size of the image and then cut them out of the background, which is a lot less work, but leaving the image full size allows for more accuracy.
Then I specifically extracted the middle girl entirely. Normally, this isn't needed for most edits, but I wanted to give them all their own individual palette, and it's easier to see where one girl's body ends and another's body begins when the image is full size. Doing this on the small size image is possible, but again; this will be more accurate. The girls can now be separated, and edited individually.
Bottom left: that's a 21% downsized version of the original, with no edits done as of now, so that small image on the left contains many, many different colored pixels and can't be used because it looks too realistic when compared to the game's style. Next to it, I extracted the women's hair to work on the hair separately. The 21% is just the result of trying out different sizes; whatever works for where they're supposed to be in the arena. I often see problems with perspective and distances in mugen edits and their backgrounds. Characters or object should become smaller the further away they are from the viewer, and making them too large or too small ends up looking wrong.
There's the green palette I always use to convert the colors. That's the hardest part. You zoom in, and pick individual pixels as you replace them with the green colors. I always go from dark to light. There's actually an extra step in there, which is that I first use very distinct colors to replace the original pixels with: colors that can be easily distinguished between: red, orange, blue, yellow, purple, pink, etc. That is because if you start with the green palette, the dark greens can still be tough to distinguish from other dark pixels that are in the original image, so that it's difficult to which colors you've already converted to greens, and which haven't been replaced yet. So when you use vivid and easily distinguishable colors, that's no longer an issue. Once you've done this to a number of colors, you then convert the vivid colors to their green equivalents in the palette, and continue, untill the entire image has been made green. Now, the color count is reduced to a total amount of 33 colors (in this case), which is well within the parameters of what MK games usually have. You then pick a palette for the skin, and you again replace every green color to a skin color. Picking a palette for this can be done either by using some kind of existing palette (from within the arena, or using a skin color palette from the game's characters), or you can pick the palette yourself, freely, or you could use the original photo's colors. For these, I combined using some colors from the original image with picking colors myself.
Bottom right: the final result, enlarged to 300% the size of the small version, just for a better view. When all is done, you add the hair, put the girls back to their proper positions, and that's it. You can now place the girls in the background, wherever they're intended to go, and work on the sand (in this case, since they're in Jade's Desert), and where their bodies touch the sand. Adding shades and shadows.
I hope at least some of this makes sense to anyone trying to figure out how this is achieved. Note that this is a tedious process, and that Photoshop has options to do this stuff automatically, I believe. It's just that I don't use Photoshop, and I actually enjoy the manual process itself. I would still recommend trying this out for yourself, as it certainly helps your artistic skills, adds to your attention to detail, and it's generally just good to have this approach as an option, if you're into editing stuff for mugen games. But if you prefer Photoshop because it's easier and faster, then you should really focus on Photoshop, I think, as this right here does take time and effort, and isn't easily achieved. Really, I just like working like this, but that's just my personal preference. Alright, good luck and thanks for reading my essay, lol.
