Heretic Metal Texture Recoloring (I need your help)

[Halfblind]

I have been attempting to color the black metal style textures from Heretic and various other texture packs. I have tried various methods and tools but none seem to work like I want. The problem is that they are black or near-black. In Photoshop and in Slade 3 It is very difficult to recolor anything in both white or black. I have attempted to lighten the textures to create a gray version but it ends up looking horrid. I have also made a couple of colored variants in Photoshop but in game they look very ugly.

In Photoshop and Slade 3 it is relatively easy to color something that is colored or in a shade of gray originally just not black. With colored images I can desaturate them in Photoshop and then apply a colored mask in either Photoshop or in Slade 3 later. I just can't do that with these textures for some reason.

If someone would like to see what they can do to them you can download them here.

These are for the most part all the textures that I need recolored. If I am impressed with your work I have a few other ones that need recolored as well. I will need them in gray, white, red, yellow and blue. I would like to see them have different colored detail (such as the rivets) but that is not important right now.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[scifista42]

Use SLADE3's "Graphic -> Color Remap" feature. Instead of applying tints, it remaps palette indexes / ranges of them - perfect for working with palettized graphics.

[Da Werecat]

Since these textures are very dark, they use very few colors. It means they can't afford losing any more colors, and they can't be brought to average brightness, because they'll look like crap.

If I wanted to make drastic changes to them, it would warrant a lot of manual tinkering.

[40oz]

I brightened them up and then did some editing to give them more depth. I only made white versions, but these should be a little easier to recolor. They might not be perfectly identical, I had to improvise a little for cracks and other noise to make it look good.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/obr39tzpzh2opwx/hmetal.zip?dl=0