Using Photoshop

Using photoshop to edit images

from WinCustomize Forums
Hi,
My brother who lives in oz is a big fan of Pompey Football Club (shut-it!!). As a thankyou for my xmas and new year with them I want to make him a desktop wall paper for his PC and send it to him. I cant find any ready made ones, so I want to convert a PFC emblem icon I have found into a bigger picture.

Im not that experienced at Photoshop (version 6) but I reckon this will be good practise. Trouble is, everytime I make the image size of the icon bigger, i lose alot of the resolution and the image looks blurred. Surely photoshop can provide away round this by allowing me to increase the size of the icon to about say 1024, but keep the original clear image?

Can anyone help? cheers, Timbersnake
1,832 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
You could try tracing the image with the Pen tool, making it into a vector graphic which retains its quality at any size and resolution.

Here's a tutorial: http://www.heathrowe.com/tuts/vector.asp
Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I learned in a book that if you keep increasing its size by 10% eventually you can get pretty good quality.
Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Unless you can successfully convert the raster image to a vector, increasing it by 10% means you STILL have a "pixelated" image in the end. Vector is the way to go here and the only way to increase an image's size more or less losslessly. Another Illustrator to Photoshop idea is save-as the image as an .EPS file.
Reply #4 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I just love the way experts talk in jargon as if the whole world knows what they mean!! Thanks for the info guys and the link. For a novice, this isnt the easiest tutorial but im just gettin my head around it. I get what the guy is trying to acheive and why.

It will take time but il give it a go, if it works out, il publish the PFC desktop wallpaper for all you pompey fans out there?...... (silence)

P.S, Harry Redknapp is a JUDAS!!!!!
Reply #5 from WinCustomize Forums Top
basically, what it comes down to is this: a small regular old bitmap like your icon, contains all the information it needs to be THAT size. When you try to make it bigger, the image no longer contains the information required to make the image look good and so it ends up pixelated. You can see for your self what that means by zooming way in on a small image.

Vector graphics, on the other hand, contain all the information necessary to make the image any size. This is because they are based on shape definitions and not pixel maps (I have no idea what I'm talking about here, but I think I'm close So when you make the vector shape bigger, it understands what that shape is suppose to look like bigger. They can define that shape at any size.

I hope that is easier to understand and I hope that I have correctly explained it. If I haven't I'm sure someone will point that out
Reply #6 from WinCustomize Forums Top
So from what I can gather, basically the idea is to trace the relevant outlines of the original design into a more simple outline, and then fill in the now empty spaces with the required colours and detail etc. In effect, making a cartoon of the real thing.

Sounds simple in theory, but quite dificult in reality if your using an icon like mine, which is quite detailed. I reckon I can get the basics down, but duplication of the actual writing of the team name might cause concern Still, with abit of practise, it will work and give me a result that should be better than I originally anticipated. Really, this is the stuff of pro graphic designers but im up for the challenge (fingers crossed)
Reply #7 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Hmmm a cartoon huh? I guess that is one way of looking at it.
There is no substitute for pixels. The previous tip about increasing the size by 10% multiple times is from a great Photoshop book and is true - to a degree. From icon to wallpaper is pushing the envelope and it will probably look like crap. What the other folks are saying about vector graphics is that a bitmap is made of dots and when the thing is blown up - whatever is blowing them up is making up pixels as it does so by looking at the pixel and the pixels around it and trying to "guess" what color the new ones should be (kind of a graphics "read between the lines").
A vector graphic on the other hand is a mathematical curve that is recalculated when resized and thus is precise regardless of scale.
So your best bets are:
(1)Find a larger graphic to start with - like scan in something or find a web site with bigger graphics.
(2) Get a program that will allow you to trace over the bitmap with vector drawing tools, then fill and color.
(3) Get a raster (bitmap) to vector conversion program - but most of trhem only work so-so and not very well on dinky bitmaps as they tend to follow the jagged edges of the pixels. So then your mathematical curves are all jinked up.
Hope this helps,
Regards,

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