Happy Leap Year
February 29th, 2008 Val
It’s February 29th. Day before yesterday, it snowed for almost 24 hours, but nothing stuck. Today it’s supposed to rain. This weekend the temps will be near 60 degrees F (about 15 C). Monday they say we’ll either get more snow or tornado weather – or both. Such is winter in upper Alabama.
To take my mind off the weather, I took a picture of one of my daffodils that is trying to brave the weather and decided to
make a little graphic out of it for you.
1. I brought it into PhotoPaint and used the magic wand to select all the yellow bits. I reversed the mask to fill the background with a solid color so I didn’t have to worry about the hundreds of shades of green and brown that might be behind my flower in the next steps.
2. I then brought the whole thing into CorelDRAW. Inside CorelDRAW, I used PowerTRACE to change the image into vectors. I had started out with a rather large image, so PowerTRACE offered to resample it down to a smaller image to make it easier to work with. In this case, I let it do that by clicking the “Reduce bitmap” button. I used the Outline trace, High quality image option.
3. Inside the PowerTrace window:
On the Settings Tab I checked Remove background color and used the eyedropper to ensure that the proper background color really did get picked. I checked “Merge adjacent objects of the same color”. Set detail very near the + end of the slider, smoothing at about 15, and corner smoothness at 0, though it probably could have been set higher for this particular image.
On the Colors Tab, I set the colors to RGB since the image was destined for the web, and gave it the maximum number of colors. Finally, I OK’d out.
I ended up with a group of 320 objects in about 120 shades of yellow. I played with the Effects/Adjust/Color balance a bit to bring some redder shades into the shadows and give a bit more contrast to the final image.
Now, here’s why I did all this as vectors rather than simply using a bitmap to start out with. My original image at screen resolution actually didn’t fit on my 21 inch screen. Had I simply resized to what you see above in a bitmap program like PhotoPaint, I probably would have lost a lot of detail and not had much control over the process. (Actually there are ways to do it, but I’m lazy.) Now that I’ve got a good looking, if very large vector, I can simply resize it. I shrunk it all the way down to about 1/2 inch square – so it could end up the size you see here.
The last step is to export to GIF. I set the dpi to 100, and the size to 100%. I used the 8 bit RGB palleted option, and kept anti-aliasing checked. I kept smoothing set to 0, chose an Optimized palette and set dithering to None. I kept the full 256 colors and set color range sensitivity to the fully saturated yellow in the forground of the flower.
I chose the white background in the Transparency dialog and OK’d out to finish.
In this particular case, I was using CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4, but you could do about the same sort of things in most previous versions of CorelDRAW. In version 12 and previous, you’d have to use Corel TRACE rather than PowerTRACE, and the older the version, the more work you’d need to put into it to get something usable.
Don’t despair people, Spring is coming!
Remember, registration for the March/April session at LVS ends March 5. If Spring is being delayed in your part of the world, take a course and have fun while staying out of the weather.
Have fun!
Val P.
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Note, I have no idea where this clipart came from, they only assured me they had the rights to use it. Whoever saved it in JPG form did it a major disservice since with it’s block colors it really should have been a GIF or PNG image. It doesn’t look too bad at this size, but if you zoom in on it, you’ll find all sorts of problems.
