Sprite Rip SOS

[ZiggytheNinja]

Okay.
I've been "ripping" sprites for a while now, but it feels so inefficient, slow, and the more I search the interwebs, the more I know other sprite rippers don't use this method, and the way I see it being done feels like magic or something. What I do is screencap, erase background, cut and paste, rinse and repeat in MS Paint. It normally gets the job done after, like, two or more weeks per sheet.
I've been investigating some of the programs that other rippers use, and I tried tile molester and yy-chr. Those programs are supposed to be able to undistort distorted sprite tiles and transform them into their original graphics, right? So I looked up some tutorials and followed their directions on how to use the programs, and guess what I found out I could do?
Nothing! The only progress I've made is that the tiles get mildly less disorted but still indistiguishable, ten times MORE distorted, or recolored. I've even followed the directions to the letter on the same rom the tutorial used, and still failed epically. So, the way I see it, I'm either overcomplicating it, underestimating its difficulty, or repeatedly missing some crucial detail that screws up the way I follow the directions. I know this is probably posted a lot in the forum, but can someone please help me out? Thanks in advance.

[daemoth]

You forgot a kind of important information... what game and on what console are you trying to rip?

[puggsoy]

Using programs like yy-chr is really hard, and a lot of the time it can be even more time-consuming than hard-ripping (aka the screenshot method). The only real reasons most people resort to this is to get 1) frames/sprites that rarely appear in the game (or don't at all, i.e. unused sprites), 2) to get frames/sprites that you can't hard-rip due to them always being obstructed by effects, other sprites, etc, or 3) if you're determined to rip them directly from the ROM so that they're "pure".
For some games it won't even work, due to the data being compressed or weirdly stored.

However, your hard-ripping method you described sounds like you're manually erasing the backgrounds from screenshots. A lot of emulators have features to disable layers, which often allows you to take screenshots of sprites on a single-coloured background, which makes them much easier and quicker to rip. I could suggest some if you could specify which console(s) you're ripping from.

But yeah as Daemoth said, if you could say which game you're having problems with then we can give more specific suggestions.