I am not a web developer, so please let me know if you are and
there is anything here that you would like to help with, or that
I can easily fix.
How do I use this?
First, you probably want to the images you want to use
yourself ahead of time using something like The GIMP or Photoshop. This can
optionally resize images for you, but dedicated image editors
will give much better quality, and let you specify your scaling
algorithm (some images will look better resized with
interpolation, for instance, and others will be better with a
nearest-neighbor/no interpolation). The resize checkbox is
checked by default for convenience; be sure to uncheck it or
change the resize dimensions if you want anything other than
32x32 (which are the dimensions of regular designs). Also make
sure, if you are using Pro designs, that you are using images
without any transparent colors, as transparent colors will not
work with Pro designs.
Select one or more palette images to generate the palette.
You may select more than one here to ensure you can maintain a
constant palette for Pro designs.
Select the image you want to load.
The design should now be generated in the table below.
Tweak the Optimizer and Ditherer settings until it looks
good enough.
Some optimizer details can be found here and
Some ditherer details can be found here and the
difference between the Floyd-Steinberg variants can be found
here. Due to the small resolution and Animal Crossing's
filter, dithering currently looks pretty bad in most cases,
so you're probably best off leaving it to None.
Go into the palette color editor and edit each individual
palette color. The Hue, Vividness, and Brightness sliders are
numbered from 1 from the left to 30 for Hue and 15 for
Vividness and Brightness on the right. So, for instance, for a
Brightness value of 11, you can choose the fifth value from the
right.
Fill out the pixels. If you are doing a pro palette, make
sure you have used all the images you want to use to generate
the palette, and load your next image. Feel free to tweak the
ditherer, but do not touch the optimizer setting, because the
palette may not be changed for different parts of a Pro
design.
Why not just use the QR code generating ones? Isn't this
tedious?
This is extraordinarily tedious. This tool exists because
Animal Crossing: New Horizons has a fully-customizable palette,
and Animal Crossing: New Leaf did not. Unfortunately, the QR
codes only support the older palettes with limited colors, so the
only way to get the full color fidelity that New Horizons makes
possible is to tweak the palette and put pixels in individually.
At least unless Nintendo updates Animal Crossing: New Horizons to
support any method of sharing full-fidelity patterns without
going through their servers.