#picrew guide

What you'll need

Clip studio paint (or another art program with animation features that lets you export each frame to a separate layer. I only will be showing CSP however)

Your artwork. Each color needs to be on a separate layer. (Sorry for those who like to paint everything on the same layer! This won't work for you)

(optional, if on windows) https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/ to speed up one specific step

Let's do this

1) open the animation timeline, with CSP pro you can do 24 parts at a time due to the frame limit, which is still plenty to speed the process up.

2) say you're doing the shirts like i did. make an animation folder for the shirt fill color, as well as the lineart. if you have any more layers that are recolored with the same color each time, make an animation folder for those as well (so say, shadows. or secondary colors)

3) put each individual shirt part in it's own animation cell. make sure the frames for each part line up. you'll want to be able to go through the timeline with each shirt on a separate frame

Your layers should end up looking somewhat similar to this

4) now for recoloring: clip a layer to each animation folder. so clip one to the shirt fill folder for instance. fill that entire layer up with the color you want that part to be. Check the frames in your animation again, now every part should be recolored with the colors in the clipped layer.

Your layers should now look something like this

5) Shorten the timeline so only frames with an actual item in them are included. (Otherwise you'll end up with a bunch of blank images later that you're not going to do anything with)

6) Hide every layer other than the animation folders and their clipped layers. So only the part is visible. Go through your frames one more time to make sure they look alright and nothing is out of place.

7) Time to export! Go to file -> export animation -> image sequence (you might want to set a shortcut for this so you don't have to go through 3 menus haha).

Make sure you're exporting to the correct folder. Set file name settings to anything you like, but make sure the start number is 1 (there might be exceptions to this, I'll go over that later). Set the image type to PNG, make sure the canvas size is correct and that the framerate lines up with your timeline's framerate.

8) Export it! You should have some files in your folder that look like this now. We'll want to rename them to just 1.png, 2.png... etc.

9) You can rename them by hand, but this is rather slow to do each time and I'm lazy. So here's how you rename them in the bulk rename utility. Open your folder in there, and then copy the settings I have here.

Yes, this is EXTREMELY overwhelming. I know. The first box (RegEx) is the only one you'll need to touch. Set the Match field to something like "Recolors_0{0,3}". Replace "Recolors_" with whatever your files start with. Also check the v2 box.

Replace can be left empty, since we're essentially removing anything that matches the regex (which is a text pattern matching syntax. We're essentially matching "Recolors_" with up to 3 zeros after it)

Select all the files in the top panel, then hit Rename in the bottom right! It should rename everything to just 1.png, 2.png... etc in one go.

10) Go to your part page in picrew. Make sure your colors are set up and you have created the amount of parts you'll need. Go to the Bulk Upload tab (there's a link in the top right).

11) Select the color you're uploading, then select the files you're uploading. Make sure the filenames match with your part ID numbers. This is important. 1.png Will match the first part, 2.png will match the second. Note how I said ID numbers, not the display order.

This means in the exporting step, you might need to change the starting number of your files. If you messed this up since you didn't read the tutorial in full before following it (I get it. I've been there before), just export and rename again.

12) If everything looks good and you got your files previewing no problem, hit upload, then wait a few seconds while picrew uploads your files.

13) YOU DID IT!!! You successfully added a recolor for your parts. Now go back to your file in CSP and fill each clipping layer up with a different color. You can now repeat the process from step 7. (export, rename and upload) to upload all parts for the other colors.

How much time does this actually save?

I never timed myself, but from experience, once you have set everything up and get the hang of it. It's pretty damn fast! Granted it does take a bit of set-up to get working. It gets more efficient the more parts you recolor at once.

I'll often go ahead and recolor the next color while the previous color is still uploading. Usually a single color only takes me a minute max to create and upload, instead of several minutes recoloring every single layer and saving each file separately.

For bulk rename utility, I set it to allow overwriting files. Which means I keep every color in the same folder and just overwrite the files whenever I rename. It's the fastest for me and saves me some storage space on my PC as well. Just make sure to click out of and then back into the folder to reload the files in there.