ClipArt Video

  How to convert a dull image to a print ready image using totally FREE softwares. The image can further be used for the website applications or sign cutting programs like Flexicut etc.

 Technically it is converted from JPEG to Vector graphics.

 Vector art is the way of graphics where the size increase of the object or picture etc. is in conjunction with the quality. To me it means that when we increase the size of the object, the clarity of the object is still crystal clear. It is not losing pixels or getting blurry as in the case of a JPEG image. When we increase the size of a JPEG image, its quality is lost. See the example below.

 Interestingly, image B is made out of image A but image A loses its quality when the size is increased because its a JPEG image. Where as the image B (As long as it is a vector art file) never loses its quality. The size may vary (mm, cm, inches, feet or meters really doesn’t matter!)

 Real Example

 Image A

Image B

How to Do it?

 Step 1: Choose an image. I have chosen this image because its a good example of small portions inside a square. It is a small image (55×60 pixels, 9.89 kb), and can help me to make the point I am explaining here. (Same clarity with bigger size). It is also part of a logo for an appliance company and one of the customers I made a website for has full authorization to use the logo on his van.

 Step 2: Save the image on your desktop. (Easier to work with) Lets say the file name is “A.jpg”

 Step 3: Open the Inkscape. Inkscape is the totally free program that will do the job. If you want to get it, go on my website and click “Get Inkscape” at the bottom.

 Step 4: Click “A.jpg”, drag and release it on the working page of the inkscape. You will see the small image surrounded by the arrows to increase or decrease the size.

 Step 5: Click on the “Path” menu on the top menu bar and choose “Trace Bitmap”.

 Step 6: In the dialogue box that appears, change “Scans” number from “8” to “256” and click the “Update” button on the right. Generally, whatever update shows, click “OK” at the bottom of the dialogue box. The image B is traced exactly on the top of the image A.

 Step 7: Click and drag the image B away.

 Step 8: Increase the size of the image B. See how clear it is! Now you can increase the size of the image A to match the size of the image B but quality will be far inferior.

 Step 9: Delete the image A out of the page and save file as an .svg file.

 Step 10: If you need to transfer the file to a printing or a cutting program as Flexicut, save the file as .pdf.

 These are the simple steps to convert an image from dull to crisp and ready for printing, cutting or for websites. All free of cost!

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Drawing can easily be done either by purely traditional stuff like pencil or more advanced equipment such as computer assisted drawing, alternating line and mass offer a wide range of expression and the drawing maybe completely flat or graphic.

Computer provides unlimited possibilities in term of medium and technique, yet a computer can produce results as worthy as a simple piece of paper and an HB pencil. Although it is true that powerful systems are needed for image processing to make complex shading and textured, however the results are often surprising standard. A beautiful graphic image done with computer assisted drawing equipment require the same qualities of artist as does the traditional use of pencil or charcoal.

Every form of art has its own beauty. While carrying the special beauty, every art requires certain basic principles to be observed, applied and refined while doing the artwork. So the art of graphic image has also a set of fundamental principles such as “element of design” and “principles of design”.

Elements of design are the building blocks of design, there are seven parts of element of design namely: Line, Shape, Size, Space, Colour, Texture and Value, while principles of design refer to something we can do with each of the seven elements, such as Balance, Contrast, Emphasis, Proportion, Pattern and Gradation. The “element of design” and “principles of design” which if we could arrange and put together into a proper combination will give a good composition which represent art in the image work.

Art is like “love” hard to explain but you can feel it when it exists in a drawing or in other artistic objects. Ability to draw images with a graphic image software tools is a great pleasure, to start a graphic image drawing all you need to do is having a computer with graphic illustrator program like coreldraw or adobe illustrator, then select an image from photos or picture loaded in your computer as digital image for reference source from which you want to make the graphic image drawing.

Below is the difference result of images drawing from source photo of my grand daughter “Mabel”, when doing popart portraiture drawing in a traditional way and with the vector based illustration program.

Doing popart drawing style with graphic illustrator program to draw animal like lion is interesting and challenging process, below is the result of drawing lion and bird with the colours filled being done to my selection and satisfaction mood.

If you like my graphic drawing you may visit my blog at http://popart-graphic.blogspot.com for more images and updates, thank you for visit and reading this article.

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Learn one very simple way, using the mask of the Black & White Gradient Map Adjustment layer to conceal or reveal parts of the image in color and other parts as a black and white version. See Part 1 at: www.youtube.com

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PLEASE READ THE DESCRIPTION FOR INFO Just my visual arts year 12 major project for school (Crestwood High School in Australia). Btw if you are wondering, HSC stands for High School Certificate. This project was due on the 1st of September 2008. When watching, keep the title of the video in mind and I encourage all viewers to perhaps, interpret this artwork in their own ways or views. This artwork did not get nominated for Art Express. No one else in my class got nominated which was really unexpected =(. ——————————————————————— I’m only allowing other HSC Visual Art/Multimedia/English Extension 2 videos to be put as a video response. Won best film award for Crestfest (school film competition) Got a 4GB Ipod Nano and LOTR (Lord of The Rings: Fellowship Of The Ring) dvd. YEAAHH!! LOTR!! ——————————————————————— I have to give these bands a huge thanks for their awesome songs. Without them, my artwork would’ve failed. Artist: God is an Astronaut Songs: -Darkfall -Lateral Noise Artist: This Will Destroy You Song: A Three-legged Workhorse Editing Program/s: -Sony Vegas 7.0 -Photoshop CS2 v9.0 Recording equipment: – Sony DSC-S600 digital camera – LG KU990 Viewty mobile phone ——————————————————————— HOW I EDITED THIS: It seems lots of people wanted to know so I’ll explain briefly. Originally I was going to sketch each frame by hand but because I started my project late and because it took too long, I decided to use Photoshop instead. First I’d record myself, import the footage to …

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The things you can do, and the amount of effects that can be derived from Image Processing is indeed endless. It can be useful to apply special effects to your images to give them real look and to prepare photographs for the web. Apart from these digital prints, photo prints are a great way to bring special moments alive. A good digital photo can recreate every moment of your special memories. That’s why digital photography has become so popular, which gives life a position to breathe freely and that makes photo prints so precious.

Online Digital Photo printing is a technique to develop digital photos on paper. It is a technique, which offers quality work without compromising for money. Digital printing can be done on different kind of materials and colors. Creating Digital Photo Prints takes lots of factors. Like Image Editing Software’s, Printers, etc Online Digital Photo Settings can also consider as a part of Image Cropping, Image Scanning, Image Stitching, Image Restoration, and Image Retouching etc.

Retouching or touching up a photo can easily be done using advanced Photoshop retouching techniques. Image retouching is done with the help of digital photo software like Photoshop, Adobe after Effects, and Photo Cool etc., which are flexible enough to retrieve any data from any available media. Retouching or Editing Image is done in modern image editing software on the photos using advanced Photoshop retouching techniques.

Image Editing, Image Restoration, Image Retouching or Image Filtering is considered Important as part of Outsourcing Services like data entry Business. Outsourcing Data Entry India offers excellent scanning of images to a format of your choice–an excel spreadsheet or a database of your choice. Our exacting standards ensure superb image capturing, image keying, and image storage and retrieval. We have several tools to handle data conversion of your scanned images and images data entry is catching up as main outsourced service.

To get the above quality work you can visit our site http://data-entry.outsourcing-services-india.com/image-processing.php to have better idea about us.

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The following are the different digital image file formats that you may encounter in Photoshop.

PSD

JPEG

One of the most commonly used file formats and most of us are familiar with is the JPEG or the so-called Joint Photographic Experts Group. It always comes with a small file size so it is best for website posting or other applications such as for MS Word Document or PowerPoint presentation. However, you have to be extra careful of the quality of your image as when saving JPEG files; you are actually compressing it and in turn losing the image quality.

GIF

Graphics Interchange Format or popularly know by its acronym GIF is the most frequent file format used in websites and other Internet applications. Good thing about it is that it comes in a very small file size so it loads quickly in any internet browser. However, this file format has a color limitation of only up to 256 colors.

TIFF

Another file format that you can use in Photoshop is the so-called TIFF or Tagged Image File Format. This appears in high quality images but also consumes a little amount of file size so it will take a little time to load especially if you are using it for web posting. This is not advisable for Internet use.

Besides the list we have enumerated, there are still more photo file formats that you can use. However, in your Photoshop editing works, those listed above are the best choices. Most of the time, only PSD, JPEG and GIF are regularly used in editing projects.

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Image editing has now become a common practice to enhance your digital photographs. Although the digital photographs are taken with proper precision but still one feels the picture could have been better with proper contrast or brightness to have that scintillating effect.

A Digital camera provides us with proper resolution of the image but still due to improper background or due to natural reasons one does not get the desired outcome. As we all know pictures are always the most cherished thing which often brings us down the memory lane with smile and at times brings tears to our eyes.

Image editing is becoming very popular practice for both professional and leisure users. Image editing is not restricted to digital photographs but one can also manipulate the traditional analog photographs or simply an illustration. There are various image editing software available to bring that sparkling difference to the images. The Popular raster-based digital image editing software includes Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, Corel Photo-Paint, Paint Shop Pro and Paint.NET. UK image editing Services uses various image editing tools to make your photos beautiful and stunning.

With the help of this image editing software one can change the background of the picture by putting a beautiful landscape or making the dress of the images in the pictures more stunning. The outcome is wonderful and it’s really hard to analyze that it was the same picture. It is as if the picture has become lively and vivacious. There is an array of outcomes with these softwares like on one hand if you can put your photographs into different templates then on the other you can smoothen the face lines and properly adjust the brightness, saturation, hue and even resize the photo as per the requirement.

Adobe Photoshop is the most applauded image editing software in use providing an impeccable opportunity to all the users. The flagship product of Adobe Systems and includes layers with masks, color spaces, transparency, text, alpha channels and spot colors, clipping paths, and duotone settings. Adobe Photoshop is a pixel-based image editor, which is the main difference when compared to other image editing software such as Macromedia FreeHand, Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw, which are vector-based image editors.

CorelDraw is popular software initially developed for Microsoft windows but now it has found applications even in Windows XP and Windows Vistas. CorelDraw provides a full range of editing tools which enhances the photographs by adjusting the contrast, color balance, changing the format from RGB to CMYK, adding special effects such as vignettes and special borders to bitmaps.

Paint.NET is an image editing software developed in .NET framework supporting Microsoft Windows. A user interface which supports a wide variety of useful software tools apart from providing layers.

The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a powerful open source image editing software that can be used in all major operating systems like Linux, Mac, and Windows. It is basically an image retouching and editing tool which also provides resizing, editing, and cropping photos, combining multiple images, Color correction, channel mixing, advanced cloning, paths, and layered compositions and converting between different image formats.

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Do you ever wonder how people go about capturing the image of a currently displaying Windows screen?  Perhaps not, maybe you already own a graphic capturing package.  That is fine, keep reading; you may still find value in this article.  Of a certain, those who run Windows Vista and Windows 7 have such a program.  It is called “Snipping Tool” and it resides under Accessories in the Program Manager menu.

A problem exists when using “Snipping Tool”: other than a highlighter and an ink pen, it has no worthwhile editing functions.  Images that are captured with this tool must be saved and then reopened within a full graphic editing software.  To further complicate matters, older versions of Windows do not include “Snipping Tool”; neither do most graphic editing packages include screen-capturing features. 

Here is a little known but long existing Windows screen-image capturing method.  It too requires that you open an image-editing tool, but there is no need for double programs, and neither must you have a graphic tool that includes a screen capture utility. 

On your keyboard you will see a key labeled “PrtSc/SysRq”.  This can be used, when setup under the right program arrangements, to force a printer dump of the current screen.  Right now, a printer dump is not our focus.  Instead, we will use this special key to capture the current display screen.

It works like this:

Tap the “PrtSc/SysRq” key one time. [Do it now.  It will not hurt a thing].
Open the Windows integrated Paint software (Start, All Programs, Accessories, Paint).  [Or open whatever graphic program that touches your fancy].
Click on the Paste function.
There it is, the screen shot that you just captured using the Windows “PrtSc/SysRq” screen capture routine.
Limit the capture to just what you want by applying the graphic editor’s Crop function.

This is quick and easy, even more so than a Snipping Tool type software.  I use this Windows feature whenever I pull a picture from http://commons.wikimedia.org for use with my ezine articles.  It often saves time over going through the download route.  What’s more, the captured image can also be pasted directly into a word process or most any other software that receives graphic input.  Just for the show of it, I captured this screen as I typed, pasted the capture onto the bottom of the article, captured the copy, and then pasted the copy into Paint for final cropping and saving. 

Cool, Hun?

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Devised in the year 2000, Xhtml is an abbreviated form of Extensible hypertext markup language. It’s a very flexible language and an application of standardized general markup language. The extension to such types of files is .XTH or .Xhtml. It was developed to make HTML more extensive and simultaneously to increase the compatibility with other formats. It can also be referred as the refined and revised version of HTML. Earlier, the conversions from one file format to the other were almost impossible, especially in case of conversions from an image to Xhtml or any other documents conversion. The image files were usually of Photoshop formats and hence could not be made compatible with HTML language.

Photoshop is basically popular graphic editing software whereby images are edited or modified. It’s leading software in terms of image manipulation and programming. PSD is the extension given to the Photoshop documents. It was developed by Thomas Knoll in the mid 1980’s. So, all the files i.e. the images and clips etc. that were created or modified on Photoshop were also not completely convertible to the HTML language. Moreover the conversion of an image to HTML distorted the picture quality and made the graphics look dull. But with the advent of Xhtml language the image can be easily converted to either of the languages and that too without any distortion. Now almost all of the files are converted to the Xhtml language rather than being converted to the HTML format because of the difference in few features that makes Xhtml superior. For instance:- some tags in HTML need not to close and remain without angle brackets but every tag needs to be closed in case of Xhtml. Secondly, all tags and attributes are to be written in lower case in Xhtml, whereas all tags and attributes are written in uppercase in HTML. Lastly, some elements can be omitted in case of HTML but in Xhtml every element has to be decoded properly.

So, if you are still stuck with your conversion problems, then don’t just sit. Surf the internet and you will find the list of many companies that will help you with Xhtml conversions. These companies have technically professional teams of PSD to Xhtml developer who make your content and designs look eye catchyand transform them into a search engine friendly mode. They also provide services like content writing, SEO and web designing etc.

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I will begin by explaining various aspects about image resizing: how it works, what the important problems are, who would be interested in this. I’ll continue by comparing several existing methods. Finally I’ll conclude with the best method to use.

How does enlarging work?

Upsizing an image increases its resolution (size in pixels/points). To do this, information from the original image is used to create the enlarged version. Imagine a grid of pixels in a plane. In the original image they are all side by side. Enlarging the image means enlarging the grid. The more you stretch it, the more separated the pixels become. Those pixels in-between need to be filled-in. This is called interpolation. There can be other steps after interpolation.

Problems that need to be solved by upsizing

One of the problems that appear is that for small images pixels on the edges may be aliased. This becomes more apparent when enlarging. This is the jagged edges problem that many upsizing methods try to overcome. In one extreme you have edges that are sharp but jagged in another smooth but blurry. A compromise between smoothing an edge and keeping it sharp is searched for. Over-smoothing to maintain sharpness is not that hard to obtain but this creates an unrealistic look to images. Another problem is loss of detailed texture in the upsized image. The only method that even considers this is reshading.

When is upsizing an image useful?

Increasing the size by 200% means transforming a 3 megapixel (MP) image into a 12 MP one. If something like this can be created without losing quality then using an average camera and upsizing it would be almost the same as using a professional camera. Also, cropping and enlarging a portion of an image would be equivalent to having a better zoom lens on your camera. Of course, taking the photo with a professional camera and upsizing it would make very large prints easy.

Well known methods for enlarging an image

I’ll present a few widely known approaches. Some are commercially available: Photoshop, Genuine fractals, Photo zoom and others are free: Reshade.

Photoshop

Although everybody considers Photoshop as The tool of choice for any image manipulation, its features cover only some basic needs in this field. It is mainly designed to be a framework for image processing by allowing the inclusion of plug-ins that can easily interoperate. Because of this, even experienced Photoshop users have a hard time when upsizing images. The default algorithms for this purpose are made to be fast but not very powerful.

Best methods for upsizing images

These methods go further in their search for better quality upsizing. They are designed to allow greater enlargement factors without serious degradation in image quality.

Reshade

This is the newest method from the ones I mentioned. It permits enlargements of up to 200% without losing any quality. This means that even an experienced photographer would have a hard time picking an enlarged version from an original photo. Beyond this zoom factor, the images look a little over-processed. Even at higher zoom ratios reshade seams to work better on most images than any of the other techniques. From my point of view it’s the best choice. I wouldn’t need greater zooming anyway because the degradation becomes visible with any possible technique beyond 200% enlargement.

Genuine fractals

This method tries not to overdo the edge sharpening and de-blurring like Photo zoom and maintains the quality of the image pretty good (for zoom factors of about 500%). For smaller zooms the image quality is very similar to what you can get in Photoshop. That means a lot of blurry edges remain after upsizing.

Photo zoom

Although the clarity of the edges is better than for Genuine fractals (at large zoom factors, 400%), there is an obvious smoothing effect that creates the impression that the image has been over-painted. This might be ok if it’s what you’re looking for but for photography, it adds an unrealistic look to the resized images. Although small details when enlarged remain smooth, reshading does a better job at this, also keeping them small.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I do not suggest using enlarging for every photo you take. The original can always look better even if an enlarged version has insignificant quality loss. But, it often happens that you want to crop only a part of a picture and it becomes too small to print or use as desktop wallpaper. Or maybe you don’t have your best camera nearby and use a lower megapixel one. In these situations enlarging becomes the best option available. I recommend reshading your pictures for best quality. It’s also freely available online at: reshade.com.

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