In this tutorial I will show you how to use the 'select by color' method in photoshop to quickly and accurately mask an entire set of wallpapers so they match up evenly in game.
Firstly, this tutorial goes a little beyond masking, it shows how I create all three necessary images for a wallpaper file. Importing them is covered in the previous tutorial :)
The first thing I do is go through the files and find all the ones that could be considered as belonging together. These are the wallpapers people would most likely want to use all in the same room and should be made to easily recolor in the same way - no one wants to encounter that one wallpaper they have to totally recolor to match everything else, it's too time consuming. So I open them all up in photoshop and arrange them in rows as you see here.
The other file I like to have open is one I can quickly pick the color channels off. Feel free to save this image file to use yourself.
Select the first wallpaper img file and navigate to select > color range.
When the box opens, the first color I pick is the lightest color in the wallpaper. When you've selected a color, it should show you a black and white image so you know how much of the wallpaper you're going to end up with selected and you can see quickly if you need to reselect. With some trial and error, I've decided 50% fuzziness gives the best results (that would be the softness of the color edges) I'm sorry about the weird color in the preview box, it freaked out when I took the screenshot. Apparently color range is shy, who knew. When you're satisfied, click ok. With this same color selected, go through ALL the wallpaper img files and do this same process.
With each img file, create 3 new layers. In one layer, grab a big paintbrush and select yellow, then paint the entire img. I always do yellow for the lightest color in the file, just for consistency. Paint over each file thoroughly, I do 2 or 3 times to make sure everything is fully painted because the fuzziness of the color selection means you will see yellow pop up where you see no selection lines.
Go back through all the images and deselect (ctrl D in photoshop) and return to the base layer. Now you're going to select by color and this time, select a darker part of the img file. This will ensure proper contrast when recoloring and give the best advantage in tone control.
Go and select magenta now. On one of your new layers, go through as you did with the yellow and very thoroughly paint that color in. Your images should look a bit like the ones above, yellow and purple with some of the original colors showing through. Deselect (ctrl D) and go to your last empty new layer.
You want your last empty layer to be just above the background img. Select red and flood fill this layer on ALL your files. Hide the base layer while you're at it. Now you can see your mask really coming together! Just think how many hours that would have taken to meticulously paint or hand select.
Go through all your imgs and, with the background img hidden, merge visible. Now you have a shiny new mask as one img! But we're not done yet.
Hide the mask layer and go back to the background img, obviously this is a good time to make it visible again. Desaturate them all. (ctrl shift U)
After they're all desaturated, I go to brightness/contrast and on the first img, establish a even numbered setting that mostly gets it to a nice 50% gray. It's ok if some parts are a little darker than others, you just want to get rid of most of the contrast to avoid black and white spots on your finished wallpaper. You can always select by color again if some areas are too dark and really need to be lightened. I try to find an even set of numbers like above so it's easy to remember and I can do the same setting on all the img files. When you're done with this, you have your texture file! Hooray, you're almost done!
Copy your gray texture file and open a new 256x512 transparent img. Drop in your copy of the texture file and use guassian blur to smooth the edges. Once you've used the action once, a quick ctrl f will use the same filter on every version.
Change the master opacity to 50% and save this as over the specular file you extracted from your cloned wallpaper.
Some things to note: My process is very much like an assembly line. I mask and adjust the texture files of an entire set, then I open tsrw and create a new project with a cloned basegame wallpaper. I extract the img files I need and copy one set of new imgs onto them. I import them into the clone, edit the inside information and where they go in the catalog and whatever colors/patterns I want to be available on them, then I export to sims3pack. I do not close the project, I just go back and copy the next set of imgs in. Edit the necessary information, export to sims3pack. Once I've gone through the entire set, I export them to package and renumber with s3oc.
Another important note about wallpaper files: if you open your game to test the file, find something wrong and need to fix it, be sure to renumber the file with s3oc before putting it in your game again. It took me a month to realize that the fixes I made didn't seem to matter because the game hadn't noticed anything had changed!
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