Hologram Effect - Roareye Black

This tutorial was made visually and textually, by Roareye Black. Original idea by Wootwootebn.

First of all, you'll need a pixel art to holographise. Grab whichever pixel art want to edit. For the purpose of this tutorial, I have decided to use Knuckles from Sonic Advance 3, as his model takes up a wide area.

Now copy and paste the character in so that there are two of them on your canvas. Now, using the Colour Drop tool, make colour boxes on your canvas of the colours the character has. As you can see from this image, Knuckles has 10 colours inside him (Black doesn't count and neither does the white around him).


i. Using the Colour Drop tool again, pick up each of these colours and go to the 'Edit Colors' in the 'Colors' dropdown.

ii. Now go to where it says Hue: and in the box next to it you firstly need to minus the hue by 30. So if it says 40 your new Hue value is 10. There is a maximum of 240 hues. If your hue is less than 30 (The hue of Knuckles' red here is 0) then you simply go backwards. From 0 Knuckles' new Hue value is 210. Simply because 0 becomes 240, and 240 - 30 = 210. Do this for all the colours in his palette. You may be pleased to know that anything in the greyscale (White, All grey tones and black) do not change through hue, so you can simply copy the colours over.

iii. Do this for all the colours and then repeat for a third palette set but this time ADD 30 to the normal hue. Again if the hue is 240 then that = 0 so that becomes 30 hue. Simple mathematics. Alternatively, you can use a professional graphics program and set the values in and it will do the work for you, however this sometimes diffuses colours and with pixel art it can make the edges blurry and ruin the quality of the picture. These three palettes are very different as you can see, but it will work.

Now you have to fill the characters in. Fill the left one with the -30 hue palette and the right one with the + 30 hue palette. A quickly way to do this is to use the Rubber Tool trick.

i. With the left character, remove the very top line with the line tool, then skip one and delete another. Repeat this cycle until you get the effect in the image above. Make sure not to get it wrong, it needs to be a pixel line deleted, a pixel line saved, a pixel line deleted etc.

ii. With the right character do the same process except remove the second line, keep the third, delete the fourth etc. Until you have two images which will match up when merged together.

Now simply take the right image and paste it over the top of the left one, your image should match up and become a holographic looking image. This effect can also be used if you lower the hue difference (For example to -10 or -20) to create the effect that the light source is coming through some curtain blinds.