How To Make A Basic ENB Palette

[Dazaster]

This is a quick and dirty guide to making an enbpalette.bmp
There are other ways but this is pretty simple

An enbpalette.bitmap is used by the enbseries graphics series for colour correction. Many mods available make use of the same black and white shaded palette, while others lighten, darken or change the shape slightly, or add additional colours. At first I used to adapt various ones I'd found on the web, but then after many hundeds of seconds of playing around, I found that their actually extremely simple to make. Here's how:

First you need an image editor with blur filter capability. I am using Photoshop CS4. This produces the best quality, whether you think so or not. That's why you have to pay the big bucks. Second Class citizens will have to make do with Gimp 2.8. MWAAHAAHAR!

In Photoshop and/or Gimp

First click File, then New
Make the size 256 x 256 pixels.
Now you should have a nice blank white square box.

Next select the rectangle tool and make a rectangle about 1/3rd the size of the box on the left.
Select the Fill tool, select Black as a colour and fill in the selected rectangle.

Now make another 1/3rd size rectangle to the immediate right of the first. Again fill it, but
this time with Grey, or the colour of your choice.

You should now have a square with 3 colours: Black - Grey - White.

OK, time to get blurry.

In Photoshop

Go into Filters/Blur
Select Box Blur
Set it to about 40 and select OK

Go back into Filters/Blur
Select Motion Blur
Set the Angle to 0 and the Distance to about 125, then OK it

Finally, back into Filter/Blur
Select Smart Blur
Set it to About Radius 20-25, Threshold 25 and quality high, then OK it

Save as a.bmp file.

You're done.

In Gimp:

Go into Filters/Blur
Select Gaussian Blur
Set it to about 15 each and OK it.

Go back into Filters/Blur
Select Motion Blur
Set Angle to 0 and Distance to about 125 and OK it.
To round off you will probably want to Gaussian Blur it again.

Save as a.bmp file.

You're done

Here's a couple of images that may help:
http://i1233.photobucket.com/albums/ff385/Dazasterous/bpal001_zps7418c012.jpg

If you want to colour the palette, just change the gray for whatever colour you want, like this:
http://i1233.photobucket.com/albums/ff385/Dazasterous/bpal002_zps725d2af1.jpg

Now you can make your own basic palette, but...beware:

Different parts of the palette represent different things colourwise on-screen.

For a detailed description of exactly what an enbpalette does, user tapioks has uploaded an image for his mod, look in the main image section, and about halfway down is an almost white image entitled How Palette Textures Work. You can save this to examine at leisure:

http://newvegas.nexusmods.com/mods/34868/?

 

This will give you a much better understanding of an enbpalette, then you can use the above technique to make a decent one for yourself.

 

Hope this helps, have fun.

Edited May 25, 2013 by Dazaster

[sqrpshr]

why not use the gradient tool instead?

[Carah]

Great tutorial, Dazaster... thank-you for sharing it to the community and a second-class GIMP user. :laugh: :tongue: