Napoleonic Series: modding leader portraits

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Thought I'd try to do my own leader-portraits graphics mod for the Napoleonic games. But I'm having trouble placing the new images correctly. Even though I use the old Leaders.bmp file as a guide, I still get portraits that---once I go into the game---are badly cropped and/or have the background colour showing around the edges.

Is there a known/established method for correctly modding leader-portrait graphics?

Many thanks in advance for replies! :-)

P.S. Been using an old version of Photoshop (CS2).

I'd worked on some of these in Musket and Pike engine, which uses the same layout as the Napoleonics series.  The dimensions are 48 (wide) by 60 high (pixels, that is). What I do is start with a background of that dimension (and if spacing is an issue -start with a background with a border (and then save it as layers - I think that would be psd format in Photoshop). Test, and if the alignment is off .. nudge - test - nudge (and look at all of the borders to make sure none have gotten cut off) - before saving it.  You can have a layer that is essentially a grid of these cells -I know others do that ... set up so that when you take the portrait that you want it ends up in a place where you can have predictable results.

For me, the challenge is in resizing and keeping the heads roughly the same size (as the source images rarely are in identical dimensions).

Fwiw I use Fireworks ... and layers, opacity, and nudge are the main techniques, that and then doing a lot of load tests.


But basically that is also the same way that you would nail the spacing for the units if you went there and modded those.