Some of the modded ships seem to have great control over their color selections. I’m pretty poor with GIMP, but is there an easy way to accomplish recoloring the ships?
I use GIMP too, and I have not figured out a way to do that. I think that all you need is experience and the airbrush tool.
You might have some luck with the magic select and the various options on the Colour menu.
You use a new layer and colour it. Then, you change the layer type to either dodge, subtract, overlay, soft light, multiply, darken only, hue, colour and saturation. They each give a different effect involving the colour. You can select the area’s that you want and don’t want colour in by deleting those area’s from the new layer.
Thanks, there’s a lot of possibilities with that!
I dunno how photoshop works or watever but with gimp is very easy to change colors (or just make designed areas with a specific color) just with the free selection tool and the option colors -> fill with color (i use the spanish version of gimp and it says “colorear” that i dunno know how to say in english). Its easy, all u need is a bit of practice. Be aware that before u colour anything u can change the opacity of the selection, and make the borders a bit blurry, for example to make the color change more “real”, in the selection tools there are a few extra options that allows u to to that.
U have also the option colors -> colour curves, from there u can even change the alpha channel and make some selecctions half-transparent or watever u want.
BTW, i dont recommend using layers for only changing colors, its far more complicated (specially for u).
Yeah, but for a beginner, it also has it’s benefits- It is easily reversible, meaning if you make a mistake, you can fix it easily/quickly.
Yes, I recently figured out that I could make a new layer and use a very small airbrush and color in specific areas practically pixel by pixel. Takes a while but can be very good. Oh and make the airbrush and .53 opacity, then the original lighting and details are still visible underneath so that it is not a solid color.
Colorize is the translation 
Layers also allow to quickly create several versions of the same ship with different colours easily. Perfect for seeing which colour fits better with each hull