Yeah, I meant Paint Shop Pro 9 (the last one made by Jasc before Corel took over), I much prefer that to Photoshop. Corel still makes Paint Shop Pro (I believe they're up to XI?) but they dumbed down some things for novice users so I stuck with my old ways of doing things.
You can still find it on Amazon and places of that nature, it's pretty cheap now (like $40 and less). I bought it back in the day but thanks to the internet no program ever really "dies". ^_^
Yes, much of the isometric stuff (especially flat things, like walls) were made with a script I composed that takes an image smaller than 256x256, then skews itself, 2 pixels at a time. I still have to go through and bump out portions to make it look more "3D" but it's a helluva lot faster than redrawing.
For the flowers it's just a "find X color", "replace with Y color" script. Takes about 2 seconds. I mostly do full palette swaps now (using the full image Replace tool), but with little stuff you don't really see quality loss in just using using Colorize.
I also have scripts for "reducing" color palettes. You find any old image on the interweb, decrease the color depth to the number of colors you want to use (usually 3-5), then use what comes out for a palette (after tweaks).
I also save almost all the textures I use, especially wood and stone textures, to reuse later, so everything looks uniform.
Everything I do is on a decent number of layers: a glass layer, an accessory layer, a base layer, a below-base layer, a background layer for checking transparency levels, so I can edit later easier.
Oh, and the Pen tool is a big help. Set it to 0.5 and it draws single-pixel-wide lines without column/row overlaps! Whee
Lastly it's linked to Animation Shop 3, so when doing a sprite it's quick work to simply make edits, tranfer the image to Animation Shop, check it, rinse, repeat :'D
Anyway thanks for the comment, Scribblette!! ^_~
