whiteswan - photoshop is not harder, it's more expensive. If you have access, just use photoshop. PSP and photoshop have similar capabilities (some filters might vary, some commands might require slightly different steps). They do have different interfaces - as a photoshop user, I sometimes am slightly lost in PSP and have a hard time finding my way around (was trying to help a friend with PSP). If you are able to invest a bit of $$, PSP is a very good program and there are a lot of people on the web using PSP.

For those unable to pay, there is GIMP. GIMP can do all the basic stuff, including the layer things. GIMP has yet another interface, which is less polished than Photoshop or PSP, which people need to learn. It probably has a few less of the fancier options, but it's pretty solid and powerful. We expect to have some beginning GIMP clothing tutorials on the site soon.

Is there anyway you do can do nice recolors in paint, as i don't have photoshop and when i try and do recolors in paint, they just go into one solid colour and it can look unrealistic. Please help

Go to the FAQ. Go get yourself GIMP and learn how to use that.

Ok, thanks.

Thanks for the tutorial. I have a few Sims with custom skin colors (blue, pink, green sims, etc.) and it's really hard to find hair styles that fit their skin. This way I can recolor some of the Maxis styles to fit my fantasy-colored Simmies :D

I tried it, but I have a small problem. I feel terrible for asking, but I was just wondering if any of you could help?

I've created the hair recolors fine in Body Shop. When I open the game and change my Sims hair, that's when things get a little strange. In this particular household I had the Texture setting in "Medium", and as soon as I changed the Sims hair I noticed it look choppy. I played around and noticed that UNLESS I have the Texture setting to "High" the hair doesn't look right. It's hard to explain, so I have taken some screenshots.

This is how the recolored hair looks from the front.

This is the recolored hair from the back. Notice the "choppy-ness", how it fades, and how the barrette is totally plain.

That is with the settings on "Medium" if I switch to "High" the hair looks fine.

I find it weird that the custom hair looks like that, cause for example, the original Maxis hair looks OK with the Texture setting in "Medium". The game lags a bit with the Texture setting in "High" (a huge household with five Sims is a bit too much for my video card), and although it doesnt look THAT bad I want to know if it can be fixed. This doesnt happen with any other custom hair styles... and I have a lot! What could I be doing wrong?

The Maxis hair from the front.

And this is the back. Looks nice

Why the drastic change between hair styles? I hope I worded my questions right. Thanks so much in advance! Great tutorial!

Sometimes when you change a color, you'll lose some of the contrast. Photoshop has Image>Brightness/Contrast, try playing with that a bit.

Finally bit the bullet and downloaded SimPE. I'm at this stage now. I'm not finding anything called Large Image File, though. Where should this be? In the lists below? Is it more like largeimagefile or somesuch? I can find the one I want in there (amhairpgskater_blend) but what should I do with it since, like I said, no Large Image File line in sight. Do I need to be on a certain view mode to find this or somesuch?

Thanks again for the help

Ah, okay. Well, it may be slightly more complicated than I originally thought, Sae sae. Sorry about that. With that particular style, search for "skater" instead of "amhairpgskater" - for some reason they're named "umhairpgskater" instead. If you search just for "skater" you should find the Large Image Files including umhairpgskater_blend0_lifo, which is what you want to open and export.

Lol... Thank you, Hyst. Doing this one little recolor is proving so complicated it's humorous. I will check that out this afternoon... And at least I'll know how to do it for next time

Faylen, I found your tutorial helpful and well-written, but became stuck on one point, I'm hoping you'll elaborate please. I'm not new to skinning, retexturing, I'd say halfway between novice and intermediate, lol. When you say, all you have to do is "save as" for some reason I found this confusing, sometimes it's the most simple things that leave us stumped. Did you mean save as, using the name of the new colour, or that we don't have to recolour that file? Sometimes I am just recolouring for a specific age group and would love to by-pass the rest. For some reason that one sentence just threw me, I'm sorry I just wasn't entirely certain what you meant. Thanks.
p.s. I am using photoshop.

Faylen is using 'save as' because for this hair the different layers in the hair all actually use the same image layout, and most hairstyles do. In the tutorial example, each of the ages child-elder has 3 images for the hair, and they do all use the same layout. So, when you are recoloring, you need to replace _all_ the files for that age (and probably all ages). So you 'save as' and give it the correct names (and also use BMP for the output format) and do it again and again for all the files that you want to be colored the same way.

So at first she got the adult hair right by using 'save as' and saving the 3 adult bmps. Once she was happy with that, she repeated save as 3x for teen, 3x for child. Then she made the gray version and save as 3x for elder. I don't think she actually looked at the toddler hair in the tutorial - one could open one of the toddler hairs, adjust the color to match, and save as many of those as are needed.

Note, if you're not recoloring the hair for other ages, you might consider if you want to remove them from the recolor file, I believe you can.

Did this make it clearer, or worse?

Okay I understand, that's how I've been doing it. I got hung up on the words, "all you have to do is save as" I wondered maybe if there was a shortcut I was missing, lol, wishful thinking. I still learned a couple of things from this tutorial though, and I didn't know I could remove files from hair, hmmm. I probably won't mess with that though, not quite that brave. thanks again.

Thanks for all!! My english is poor, but i'm gonna try it ^^

crazy question. I have this gorgeous color I ame up with just messing around. Is there a way to apply said color to all the meshes (both maxis and custom) without loosing any of the detail in the hair?

Kitiara - You would have to go and recolour every Maxis and custom mesh (that you have) to match, tweaking the colour on each one. Depending on what the colour is (and what the original is) they may vary slightly, and they'll certainly vary somewhat in texturing (since Maxis meshes are handpainted and many custom meshes are either computer generated textures or photoskinned). There's no "apply this colour to everything" button anywhere, and recolouring all those meshes would be -quite- a big undertaking (several days worth of projects). I suggest you maybe choose certain meshes that you really like that would be pretty in that colour, and just do those to match.

Thanks. Was hoping there was a shortcut *giggle* Oh well... looks like my days off are gonna be spent recoloring my hairs!

Thank you for that explain how to make hair color. Unfortune I don't have Adobe Photo which are not same from my computer. I don't know how to get the .package file.

Thank you so much, this really helped me

what about if u dont have photoshop!!

thank you!

Hi thanks so much for the tutorial. I had figured out about the hue/saturation button but I was getting really annoyed cos I couldn't figure out a way to put streaks and stuff in my Sims hair now I can thanks to your tutorial. I'm going to go and do some and hopefully upload on here (eventually) thanks again your an angel!!

I found this extremely helpful. Especially the tips on making it look good. The one thing I didn't get at first was the file names, and how they tell you which age group they are with the first letter. Duh! But now I know and that makes it so much easier

Woot! I did it, I finally made my own recolours, I do not have to beg other people to do them anymore *feels proud* Thanks for the great help, I am not such an idiot anymore!

If you have Photoshop (or PSP) you can make an Action which will apply the same steps over and over to the various files. Automating the recoloring process might help speed things along.

i cant open the rar, it says unexpected end of archive. i want to be able to read it when off line.