Glass Software/ techniques?

Going in search of the Holy Grail next? or the Loch Ness Monster? Sasquatch?

you don't want anything difficult do you? You want what everybody wants, and its not out there as far as I know, there are mosaic tile programs, but they leave alot to the imagination also.

It's called tracing paper. Follow the outline you want freehand with a sharpie. Then scan the tracing paper and open in editor program of choice and scale the drawing as needed.

The real problem is that lines between colors are zero thickness in the real world and of considerable thickness in stained glass work while colors are very subtly shaded in the real world and usually not in stained glass. You have got make choices about line width and color that effect the result. I use Paint Shop Pro for my fairly limited image work and two tools you may find in other software, perhaps with other names, produce interesting results. Under Effects/Edge Trace Contour makes a black and white image with lines between the color shades. Perhaps more useful are under Effects/Artistic Effects where Colored Foil has the effect of converting a color area of varied range into a flat area like color foil was pasted there and Contours which has the effect of thickening the edges of colors and turning the color areas into flat color between the contours - it has a lot of adjustments to control the loss of detail. I used the Water Lilies image included in Windows XP/My Pictures/Sample Pictures and was able to quickly produce several interesting effects. I have also found the Color Replacer Tool to be very useful because it can be used to "brush" out one color with white or another color under control in a way that Flood Fill does not. Basically, you select the color you want to replace (with the "eyedropper" most conveniently) then switch that to be the background color and select the replacement color for the foreground. Then the tolerance of the tool is set to choose what range of tones will be selected. Then the cursor is used as a brush to paint the new color into the old areas. I have used it to take colored background out from around text so I could OCR the text. I use Undo a lot and save images along the way.

Getting lazy are we? I've done some such with photoshop. You can reduce to black & white or monotone, and really simplify the photos alot, and then put in the lines manually. When you get a solution, don't tell the Chinese, or they'll be offering SG panels of your house, kids, collectibles for $99 bucks in your choice of colors.

When you get a solution, don't tell the Chinese, or

That's exactly where I was headed with all this. Stand by.

Thanks, Mike.

I have PSP, I'll see if I can follow your suggestions and make something work. This is a start on what I want to do. Thanks again.

That is SO 1980's....I've been doing it that way for 25 years. Gotta be a better way.

Try scanning the photo using black & white document setting. That increases the contrast so you get black and whites only. If you can use a program that has a contrast setting just crank that puppy up and it'll help get rid of those nasty gray areas....m

There is a "cartoon" filter for Photoshop that might do just what you want. You will have to search the web for it.

Try Kodak Easyshare (free download, last time I checked). It has a category of 'Fun Effects' in it, one of which is 'Coloring Book'. It pretty much does what the less ambitious sprites in Photoshop do.

But you should still consider giving Photoshop a chance. There's nothing as good for finding edges of stuff (from which to trace lines).

in article tvb5h.26569$ snipped-for-privacy@tornado.ohiordc.rr.com, db at snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote on 11/10/06 9:32 PM:

Another possibility is The Gimp. That is a fairly powerful (but easy to use) image processing program developed in the Linux world. It is open source and free. And you can find executable versions for a number of operating systems, not only Linux.

I have access to thousands of filters for both progs. You do the leg work to find which one will work, email me and I'll try to get it to you to play with.

$29

Nah...that'd be Brady's price. I can command higher prices. :

Have you tried this link yet, there are two programs.