Getting to know your graphics program can be a pain. I'm helping someone at the moment that is quite frustrated, and I thought maybe the answers may help the rest of you out there. Unfortunately, I don't have Paint-Shop Pro, so I can't really help anyone there, but there may be some ideas in here that you can use for that program. This is also done with version 5.0, but should be similar enough to any other versions out there.

His problem is the hair, and the sim he wants to make has a different skin tone than the traditional lgt, med, and drk. So I will show you how to use the selection tool and the Hue/Saturation tool to change things into the colors you want.

The first issue I will tackle is basic color changing. For this I am going to use the C001Falgt_Shannon.bmp that comes in the game and SimShow. I'm going to turn her into a blue haired, alien-skin toned girl.

Now after you have converted the .bmp to RGB coloring so it's easy to edit, Use the selection tool I have highlighted here in the graphic below, and "cut" around the hair. You don't have to follow the lines exactly, just mostly. As you can see, I left out the chunk of hair on her forehead. I can fix that later after I get the base coloring done. And this is what you end up with:

Now that section you have chosen can be changed, painted or whatever and it won't affect the face area. Just whatever is inside the "running ants" part.

Now up in the "Image" menu, there is a side menu for the choice "Adjust". Thats what we want. The Hue/Saturation tool is in there.

Drag the sliders and way you like, looking for the color you want, then brightening it up or taking it all away. This is the blue I liked.

*NOTE* Depending on the original hair color, you can't always get the shade you want. Shannon's hair is too dark to get a nice red-head, for example. If that's the shade you want, I'll show you how to get it in the next chapter.

And now I am going to change her skin tone. So in the "Select" menu, I choose to invert the selction. Now her face is selcted.

Going back into the Hue/Saturation tool, I drag the sliders around to get the tone I want. This is what I came up with:

Now I deselect everything. I'm ready to do touch ups. Using the dropper tool (the one in tthe tool bar that looks like an eyedropper) I use the colors that are already there in the hair to clean up the edges and color in the lock on her forehead. I change the eye color, put some eyeliner on her, and using the airbrush tool with the pressure set to around 5 (you can adjust this in the tool options menu that should be on the right side in that stack somewhere) I color in her lips purple.

Why the airbrush tool and why use so little paint? This way I can change the color and still see the lines of the original lips. This is a great tool for highlights, shadows and small color changes like this. The airbrush is your friend.

And here is the finished product, compared to the original. How cool. :)