Cleaning up poor artwork using Corel PSP and CorelDRAW
February 13th, 2008 Val Posted in CorelDRAW |
This week, I was given the challenge by some folks starting a new preschool at our church to turn a very tiny, very compressed and artifacted JPG image into something they could use for a sign to be posted by the road.
There were two images, but I’ll only post the one. 
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.
I began by using Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 and the Noise removal/Jpg artifact removal tool to help cut down on the artifacts. Obviously, this image had been saved and resaved several times and this only gave me a start to cleaning it up. I then resized the image 300%. I used the smart resize option and turned smoothing way up to cut down on a few of the jaggies. I then selected the brush tool and painted over all the black outlines giving them a nice smooth and solid black. (I could have just as easily traced over these lines with the pen tool in CorelDRAW or the brush tools in PhotoPaint.)
Once I had nice solid black boundaries, I used the magic wand tool to select what should have been solid blocks of color and fill them with the main color in each area. Once that was done, I went back with the brush tool and no selections and made sure the edges between the colors and the black were smooth and solid.
At this point, I exported the file as a GIF and imported it into CorelDRAW X3. (My copy of X4 was having problems at the moment due to an improper restart of the computer and I was running out of time to do another restart.) Right clicking on the bitmap, I chose Trace Bitmap/High quality bitmap. Obviously this isn’t a high quality image, but the options in the High quality range are closer to what I wanted for the final result. I set Smoothing to 25, ran detail almost up to the top of the + end, chose CMYK mode since the sign company wanted CMYK output. I used the maximum number of colors - in this case 26 - checked Delete original image, and Remove Background. It automatically chose the white background, which was fine. I didn’t want the white eyeballs or shoes removed, so those stayed put by not checking Remove color from entire image.
Clicking OK gave me a pretty good trace result. I had to do some minor color tweaking - notably on the girl’s back hand, and node editing around the car tire and lights areas. At that point, it was ready to send off to the sign company who was happy to receive a CDR file. I did back-save it to version 12 since I wasn’t sure which version of the software the sign company was using.
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