Sprite Stitch Board!

I tried to make a pattern for the Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword logo using Photoshop, and it appears to have worked nicely, except I'm not entirely sure how to figure out how many colors are in it, and what floss colors the pattern colors would match up to. Is there an easy way to do this?

Here's what I've got so far

O_O Wow!

This isn't great as a pattern because you can see the squares in it from the grid on the pattern, but it should give you a good idea for colors.

Hope this helps!!

P.S. If you have a pic of the pattern that you created, I should be able to make a better pattern with no squares in it showing the colors.

P.S.S. Freaking awesome job putting this together, it looks really really good!I've seen other patterns created in Photoshop, but seeing how excellently yours turned out, I may have to play around with it.

Thanks, I just found a tutorial on the web about how to make patterns in photoshop, but the trying to figure out colors was going to drive me crazy. That pattern should help a lot! Once I get the money saved up, I'm thinking about buying a nice pattern maker. I downloaded one called STOIK Stitch Creator 4 for the PC that has a 15 day free trial and I really like it so far. It even gives you a "Stitch" preview as if the pattern was a finished product. I'm working on a pattern now from the first TMNT game on NES that I'll hopefully get up here later today or tomorrow. After that I think I'm going to try to do some more Zelda patterns before my free trial runs out.

Oh, and here's the original Skyward Sword pic if you want to use it.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=475

This is the link to kg chart pattern maker in the techniques and guide section on here. It will tell you how to use the pattern maker. You can download KG chart for free.

The easist was to see how many colors you have is to use the "save for web" feature in Photoshop.* It's also the easiest way to reduce colors. If you are careful you can get great results. You can either have the program try to do it for you, or you can choose colors to eliminate by hand. I used this on my last big project. If people are interested I could write up a tutorial on this but it's not that hard to figure out.

I always use Photoshop to clean up source images before using PC Stitch to make a chart. The advantage of a chart is that you can see the difference between similar colors, something that is hard to do with gradations.

*edit: here's a screen cap showing the original (jpeg) and my edit which has reduced the 230 colors to 3!!
Now editing will be a piece of cake :)

Yeah i have to agree with the save to web option being invaluable in photoshop when editing graphics for a pattern.

I end up using this technique every day in my job as a flash banner designer.

I am using PC Stitch pro 9 for the first time. I made a pattern and doing a cross stitch picture of pattern. Do you use photoshop just to reduce colors only. I just exported picture in to the pattern maker and counted colors on orginal picture. I put a size in there and put number of colors in there.
I have used KG chart for most patterns I made before. I had to change a little of colors in it and change things in picture to make it look like orginal picture.

deborah wrote:Do you use photoshop just to reduce colors only.

No - I use Photoshop to do as much as possible before I import it into my pattern maker. It's much easier to re-size, edit, and reduce colors in an image editing program. And I love Photoshop, so sue me.