[DeeZeL]

I am writing this to clarify some points in Blade's tutorial (also because i lack the presence of any visual material to help you ), which can be found here:

- You will need a RGB 60x48 image (meaning that it MUST be a 24-bit color image)

- You should use the pencil tool (right click the brush icon and select pencil)

* Now you need to set the color for the corners, which is BLUE, and it is read by the game as a transparent color.

- There is a window on the left with 3 tabs (Color, Swatches, Styles) you can make the blue color from either the color tab (set the R & G to 0 and the B to 225) or select it from the Swatches tab (the blue color in the first row).

- Now color the last pixel in the any corner of the image, one pixel beside it and one pixel below it. And do the same with the other 3 corners (one pixel over it if you are coloring any corners in the bottom of the image).

- After you colored your corners (hopefully correctly ) you need to make the darkened bar. I am not a pro so heres the way i do it:

* I zoom in the image.
* I select a 7 pixel high are using the 'Marque Tool' (Hotkey "M") leaving the 2 blue pixels colored in the bottom corner of the image, drag it until i reach the other colored 2 blue pixels (if you know what i mean).
* Now you 'partially' made the darkened bar, in order to complete it, hit the SHIFT key, which will allow you to select additional area to the one you select it earlier.

- If you done what i said correctly, right click the selected area => Select "Fill", a window will popup, set the following feilds as follows:

Use: Black
Mode: Darken
Opacity: 60%

- The darkened bar should now look correctly

- Blade's Cameo Tutorial is accompanied by a pcx image, which contains ALL the characters of RA2's cameos. open it in the adobe photoshop *You should remove the 'snap' option in order to be able to place the characters correctly, to do so, click on 'view' and remove the tick beside the word 'snap'* select any character you want using the Rectangular Marquee Tool, presst CTRL+C to copy it, go back to your image, press CTRL+V to paste your selection as a layer which you can move by using the Move tool (Hotkey "V")* Note: the character must be one pixel over the bottom of the image and one pixel below the darkened line*.

- Repeat the last step until you formed your label.

- Now use the Magic Wand tool (Hotkey "W") in order to remove the Blue areas which came with your characters.

- Use Godwin's Cameo Glass Effect Tutorial to successfully make a glass effect to your cameo.

- Now you're almost done, you just have to convert the image to an 8-bit colored image, to do so, select "Image" in the tool bar => Mode => Indexed. A window should pop up now, make sure that its fields are like this:

Palette: Local (Selective)
Colors: 256
Forced: Black and White

press OK (duhh?!!?@).

- close photoshop, open xcc mixer, select "View" from the toolbar => "Palet" *Note: make sure that there is a tick next to 'Use For Conversion'* => select "ra2.mix - cache.mix - cameo.pal".

- Now right click on your image and click "Copy As SHP(TS)".

Im really sorry if i was confusing, but thats the simplest i can get, for more questions please PM me.

thank you,
DeeZeL