Character art issues

[MycanoidLord]

So long ago when I was pretty young I got really into playing Exile 3 and Blades of Exile. Then recenty when I saw A:EftP I decided to give it a try and had a blast. So now I've decided to play Avernum 2-6 to experience the whole story. I just got to Avernum 4 and something that's been grating on me the entire series finally made me snap.

 

In every game the descriptions go out of their way to talk about how pale everyone is from spending their lives in the caves. Which makes sense. But then every single one of the character pictures, pc or npc, have people who look tanner than I do. It just doesn't make sense. So I loaded up my paint.net program and took one of my pc's pictures and edited it to make her look a lot paler.

 

When I went to put it in the game though I just got an empty graphic, there was no image at all for that character. All the file properties were the same, file size, picture size, file type, etc.. After trying different things for a while I tried to take the original picture in my editor, save it without any changes and the same thing happened. So the program was the problem. Then I tried gimp, and that kinda worked but it made the character and a square around her orange for some reason. Then I tried paint and it doesn't even have an 8-bit bmp save option. So now I'm out of ideas.

 

Does anyone know what program I need? Or why I couldn't find any other threads about this? I mean I can't be the only one who noticed this discrepancy and had an issue with this right? D:

 

PS: I tried putting my edited picture into the Avernum 3 data files and loaded up my saved game from that and it worked fine.