SewArt - Digitizing a Photo Explanation

[Music] hi there thanks for joining me today I want to address a question that I get a lot and that is digitizing photos photos of animals or people specifically and I don't do a lot of these because they are so time intensive as well as a stitch intensive but I do want to help those of you that are trying to figure that out there's a lot that goes into these so there's not going to be any one straight tutorial kind of answer there's a lot of different ways that you can go depending on the design that you bring in and the desired ending I have two other videos on digitizing photos and so are and they're pretty basic so if you want to find those look on my playlist or I'll try to remember to link them down below excuse me so check those out if you want something a little bit more basic this is more of an explanation than a tutorial so I'm gonna go ahead and get started we want to go up here to the open button and whenever you download so are you should receive a so art file an S&S file in your programs file and in that should be a PNG of a tiger okay so on windows 8 I go to this PC and then I scroll down to my operating system double click on it click Program Files down here is SNS computing and we're going to choose the tiger so they're both P and G's which is just a little bit higher quality than a jpg and also it won't have the background here of the white on this one but as far as digitizing the digitized pretty much exactly the same no big difference on either one of them and the digitizing this white will be included so it doesn't really matter if you use a PNG or a jpg for something like this I would encourage turning it into an S Viji first and then digitizing it so are it does wonderful with SVG's and SVG's keep their colors we can't I haven't figured out how to do this into an SVG other than turning it into two colors which is like really still really cool it's what I think I ended up doing with one of my videos with bruiser my cat okay so we're gonna choose open sorry for the long explanation there all right so here's our beautiful sample picture the SNS sends us we should all have this so it's something that you can work from before we get started I want to mention that when you're doing a design like this it'll be really dense so you want to use it on thick material and have a thick stabilizer that's you know your regular stabilizer that you use maybe fold it up a couple times or not folded up but layered a couple times or you know it's something thicker like it's a paper tearaway so you want you want a nice thick bottom for it because when these two colors butt up against each other the white and the black they're both competing for that fabric and if there's not enough stabilizer the black is going to take as much as it wants and then whenever you stitch out the white the whites going to take as much as it wants and they're gonna be a little gap in the middle we don't like that gap that gap is ugly so sometimes the gap happens when you're designing so I can't explain that yet but whenever you it's design and it looks like they butt up against each other and then you you stitch it out and it has the gap that could be your answer okay alright so let's just get back into this so there's four different ways to start to digitize this you have your poster eyes option you have your wizard option you have your color reduction option and you have your merge colors all of these have their merit they're all really easy-to-use they're all gonna get you different results and they all work with each other as well so the wizard is the first thing I'm going to show you guys because it's the automatic tool alright so you're welcome to read through all of this when it opens up on yours it's just basically telling us what it's going to do and how it's going to change things all right so our current number of colors is 256 you can also look down here in the corner and now they'll tell you what your colors are and once you click on one of these what it's going to do is it's going to bring the colors down to workable for you so for me workable is on something like this ten colors and under other people with multi needle machine they might be okay with twenty colors or you know more than that so it's all going to be depending on what kind of material you have what kind of machine you have and you know what's going to work best for your specific situation there's no streamline answer for how to digitize photos and so our so we're just going to gradually take the numbers down and basically with all of these different options the the key is to be gradual see how he has a dark eye right here at dark on the top and light on the bottom it's really hard to keep that eye from bleeding up into that black but we're going to try and go and gradually lets us do that so and the side-by-sides are really really nice to have you don't get the side-by-sides whenever you're reducing colors and the other parts and the other things other options okay so let's keep going down okay so that made it a little bit more grainy and that's fine but it's not that much so we still like it alright so we start to lose our darks they start blending in with other things we get to sixteen so let's go ahead and choose next and this is going to bring our color number down by merging the colors burp excuse me per percentage so that's gonna be more like the merge button merge colors tool up at the top but again we're just going to go gradually we want to keep the darkness of our black lines and we also want to keep the lightness of the eye those are our two kind of points so we're keeping an eye on so this is looking good and it's bringing us all the way down to 14 colors and has it not changed that much from this one to this one let's see if we go all the way that's still a lot but it's doable all of our colors are still really bold our light our eye is light and now we're down to nine colors okay so now they're going to reduce the speckles this is just kind of gonna clean things up oops mm-hmm okay that's 100% D speckle okay and now it's going to remote merge any remaining small colors that's okay to merge this we want most of this color to be the same okay so now we're finished with this and it brought us down to five colors which is really really nice now after this all we have to do is clean up and you can use again all of these same tools except for the wizard again I actually might be able to but you're not going to get a specific you don't need the color reduction the merge colors is going to be nice for this because you can click on this and de speckle it you don't want to merge anything you want to dispel and then anything that you really want to do speckle like this is not going to be a good stitch out at all because there's so many jumps but I'm just using it as a tool okay so you can take your take your mouse and right click and hold down I mean left click and hold down and just wipe away anything you don't want and choose click on it again and it will merge it with other colors that work better for it which it didn't do so it's what it's supposed to do but there isn't any other black for it to go with I guess so obviously we're not gonna use this for a stitch out because of all of this crazy stuff but we could choose the speckle a few more times and on something with a little bit more blocking like a a little bit more color continuation you won't have to do this as much okay so this isn't going to be good for a stitch out but I wanted to show you how those things worked so do not try to stitch out at this point if you do you're gonna have it jump from here all the way down here here here up there over there over there and you're gonna have a million little jump stitches to have to trim you don't want to do that we need to make this into a big piece there's all kinds of stuff that goes into that up and turning it into something that you can use if you try to stitch it from here you'll go insane okay so even though you have only five colors you still have an order for all of this every time that I've tried to bring it into the stitch image and save it it's locked up my computer so I'm not going to do that until the very very end and I'm going to say goodbye to you guys before it happens okay so let's go back to normal let's get out of here undo everything the wizard did or it was supposed to nope let's start a new one no I don't want to okay alright so that was with the wizard that was our little journey with the wizard and now if you want to you don't have to use the wizard you can use posterize and it gives you this little printout up here so we could do a side by side it's not going to be perfect because your hands are or well you can't kind of make it the same size but it's just going to be a little bit different because I'm not going to take the time to totally dive into there but I like posterized because it makes it it does the more uniform look that we're going for see how this is all kind of spotty and cute over here over here it's more like a painting more like a paint by number painting and with the posterization you can make it lower and lower and this stay is the same so you can see the difference and what you're doing is over here is 105 colors is you're just bringing down the colors blending features d speckling and you want to do combination of all of these things there it's really hard to say what are your settings and think that those are going to work for you and your project unless we're both working on the exact same project and clicking everything specifically exactly the same you're just going to have to play around and see what works best for you so we want to keep the eyes remember and the darkness of the lines there oh that looks really good okay so even though we have 22 colors we have if it was so out it's going to be happier because it has more continuous lines in the wizard we had a lot of thin and spotty lines because of the whiskers okay let's see what happens when we go all the way a posterization level wow that looks cool but not where we're going well it's not what we're going for if we're going for what most people are going for but that is a cool that would be close to job this would be a close stitch out - and there's only 15 colors however there's a green down there there's black and this gonna have a jump stitch and then a jump stitch over here there's a bunch of little things so you'll still need to do quite a bit of cleanup but you can just play with the feature blending see if that helps oh that's cool we lost our eyes but it darkened them so if you don't want to go up here and use the specific tools this is really it will get you mostly where you're going okay if you have a multi needle machine this wouldn't be so bad because it you know will do its thing so just play with everything don't don't feel like you have to be stuck to any specific way of digitizing cuz we're gonna do it our way yes sir okay here's our little guy again we've done posterized we've done the wizard and now we're gonna go color reduction this one is very very simple this is the very first way to do it in my opinion but you know it's not going to be in order up here because not everybody's doing the same thing again the key is gradual so we'll go from 256 to 200 and see if it changes anything nothing that dramatic okay we'll go oh and it even brought it down more than that we'll go to 100 and see so you can see it starting to get a little bit sharper and blending into its each other a little bit more let's jump all the way to 50 and see what happens still looks pretty good let's go to 30 so you can see that the colors are starting to get a little bit more grainy separating from each other and trying to make blobs of each other so go to 20 so you'll just have to see what you're going for you know that's what's gonna be the major thing you keep going down keep going down keep going down and you're going to get something like this eventually we have five colors here and it's going to be terrible stitch out because there's gonna be a bunch of gem stitches but once you clean it up it won't be so bad alright so let's go back up to 256 oh I can't do that oh boy okay we're back up to 256 if you just want that that nice crisp kind of trace just choose two or three so two not so crispy with this picture you'll have to do a lot of cleanup still but but that's still really cool it would be a cool stitch out once you've got that cleaned up let's go to three and see what happens those so there you have a little bit more dimension he kind of looks really cool but you'll still have to go in and do a lot of cleanup so that your stitch is continuous through here instead of blocked up you know so that is the reduce reduce colors button and now this last one it's going to be the merge colors button and this one I still kind of struggle with what all of this means here for some reason whenever I try to read it my brain just rejects it so I'm not really sure what's going on here but we start with 256 colors all of those colors are represented here and what they are are specific little pixels in the picture so one percent of this entire picture is that color maybe 30 percent of the entire picture is this color maybe 10% of the picture is this color so that's what we're going to do we're going to take all of those percentages and merge Andy speckle everything all right I have it set at 120 now we're going to go to merge colors and the first thing that you can do is merge range it's going to merge everything under like 50% first to kind of bring it from 256 down to a more manageable number click OK all right so run it down to 93 colors and didn't change things too much in here so let's go up to merge range and do 1% and like everything else gradual is the key okay merge range looks like the highest thing is not even 3 percent so let's merge everything under to see what happens okay so that's a little bit it's very very nice and crisp and so it's a little bit more what we were going for and now you can do that merge range again you Candice back the whole thing let's do speck everything under 10 and not a yeah see that merges it together and kind of gives it that painting look they're just going to go through and click on this marriage it click on this one merge it and it merges it with a color that is closest to it so that you can try to bring down the amount of colors that you have now when we click on this one this one is really crazy it definitely has to be merged but you can also do special at first and that kind of brings down the amount of traffic that you see and so what each of these are though is it's a stitch a jump a stitch a jump stitch a jump you do not want that so you definitely want to merge these colors as much as possible but pay attention to what colors over here are changing so we have our eyes still which is really great but now underneath eyeliner here is all weird and broken I'll have to go with in there with the so I'm not going to stay here and do this the whole time it will take a really long time however you can see where I'm going with this so go ahead and click on each of these and merge or de speckle and if you click on so say we're clicking on this one it's going to merge it with the 1.82 but we'll undo the one yep but if I click on the 1.82 and merge it it will merge it with the five or the 228 instead of the five 24 so you have to click on the one that's going to merge to the left is how I understand it and you're going for whatever color amount you want here at the end as well as you know contiguous blocks of color that will help you to not have to have a million jump stitches I'm going to click OK and this is not right obviously so let's get out of here and open them back up again and I know I probably could be doing undo or some fancy trick that I'm figured out yet but that's the fastest thing for me okay so if you just want to isolate this guy and this is also another tool for cleaning up say we just want that background to be a totally different color and there's going to be different colors of like greens and blues in here because of the pixelization over here so we're going to take a color there's different than all of that take our biggest brush setting and go in here and [Music] take our background back basically it's not gonna change the colors a whole lot I have done this a couple of times it's not going to change the colors a whole lot but it helps you to isolate what you're trying to digitize obviously you're not gonna go like a madman and go off fast like me take your time do it right but that's how you can isolate specific things in the picture that way you don't worry about digitizing all the stuff in the background although ideally the stuff in the background would just merge all into one color but it's not doing that with this picture this picture is quite difficult to digitize so you'll see it didn't change the colors at all yet there 2:36 so still not that much but it's stuff that you don't have to deal with in the background if you also just want his head then you just block out all the rest of that all right so let's let's go to this and go down to like 4 colors ooh that's cool maybe just three colors though hmm all right so every time that I brought this in a stitch image it it stops up on me so before I save it I'm gonna say goodbye and turn off the video and then I'll post a picture of well I guess I don't need to post a picture of it cuz I'm not gonna stitch it up oh that's what I'll do I'll open it and so what Pro and I will foul videotaped that because that doesn't do anything so I'm gonna say goodbye in a second after I show you guys some features and then pick up again in so what Pro okay all right so with the stitch image you want to go over here to Auto so image this isn't going to be something you're going to want to manually digitize because there's so many different things going on you want and of course in in our real world this is all cleaned up Kay it's all cleaned up in blocky and beautiful we're going to choose Auto so so all colors and this is going to take a while usually okay so the auto so is finished sorry about that Auto so is finished you may now save the stitches to an inverter file by clicking save or save as so I just want to point out over here the stitch time this is 86 minutes total stitches zero I don't know why it says that probably cuz I haven't done the save as yet however I am going to go ahead and say goodbye to you guys now so that if I get stuck I don't lose this video again I've done this like six times I'm really tired so I'll see you in a second at so at Pro well it didn't crash on me this time so I decided to stay here and so our before we jumped over to silhouette Pro I just don't think that my computer liked working with the screen capture stuff oops sorry screen capture at the same time while I was trying to save such an intense design okay so I wanted to point these things out to you so we have three colors and our size is not I'm not going to change it in here I'll change it in so at Pro if I need to but I'm not going to change it because I'm not going to stitch this out however this is how many stitches we ended up with just this three color design and it says it's going to take two hundred and eighty three point five minutes it's a stitch out it took a really long time I wish I would have timed it but it took a pretty long time to to just save it and do the other stitch out here so let's go ahead and close this one now that I showed you guys this also this is all the colors on the side here so it once we get into so at Pro you'll get to see all the jump stitches to happen if we just leave it like this okay so let's close it close so our it all together and I just saved it on my desktop so it looks like it put it into a bigger hoop than I have because it was a bigger size which is fine but normally it would come up as the 4 by 4 hoop on my computer it's having a hard time wanting to open it okay / and so art this keeps freezing up on me so I'm going to try to go fast over here and so art you can see that there's three colors and if I clicked on them it's probably going to freeze up for some reason but it's going to show you all just the pink okay up here in the view you can choose this button right here this is jumps always hide always show - show thick let's show dashed click okay okay so now you can see all of the little lines it's not that visible here with these colors and the way they have this but you can see there's a lot of jump stitches for only three colors that's why cleaning up and having continuous blocks is going to be your best bet mmm let's see let's sue Thicke and see what it shows you [Music]

Channel: CleverDog Designs

Views: 8,596

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Id: oiKvMCh2lTQ

Length: 29min 18sec (1758 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2019