First, select the color picker and left-click the highlight color on the sprite you're recoloring. Like I mentioned in the angle section, the brain generally sees points as angles, so avoid them if at all possible when that's not what you want to convey. They worked on the originals because they were only ever shown on a white background in the game; in the newer games, and on the Internet where you may be showing off your sprites on various backgrounds, this results in very visible, horrendously ugly colored "dots" around the outline. Do not recolor two different shades with the same shade , barring a few exceptional cases where the original sprite has too many shades for the color scheme you're going to give it. If there is something off please point out or go ahead and edit sprite.
nest...