| Cleaning Clip Art in PI 4.2 | |
Ahhh...clip art. The wonderful world of jagged black and white images that take hours to paint in to make a smooth edge. The beautiful images we want to use from Dover Books or ArtToday that just don't seem to scan well or clean up well. The pixel by pixul editing we do to get rid of the jaggies. Don't you just love clip art?
I love black and white clip art. Using Blade Pro or just PI with a black and white image can have some amazing results. However, I have shied away from a lot of black and white clip art because of the time involved in cleaning it up. Not anymore. With this tutorial, I'll let you in on my quick and dirty way of cleaning up black and white clip art.
First of all, we need an image. Go ahead and take the before image at the bottom of the page for your image. It if from ArtToday, or more accurately, a Dover ClipArt book, one of the silhouette books. I like this image, but haven't used it because of the jaggies. Even resizing down to a usable size didn't clean it up. Anyway, save this image to your hard drive and open it in PhotoImpact.
1. First thing you want to do is make sure you are working with a True-Color Image. This image was originally a black and white 1-bit image. Go to Format-->Data Type-->True Color (24-bit). This should create a duplicate image. We will be using that one.
2. Go to Edit-->Selection-->All (or click CTRL-A). Your entire image should be selected now.
3. Go to Edit-->Selection-->Convert to Object (or right click on your image and select Convert to Object if you are using your selection tool. Your image should now be an object. This step probably isn't necessary, but I like to work with objects (layers).
4. Select Effect-->Blur & Sharpen-->Gaussian Blur. A box with several different levels of the blur will come up. We don't want to use this. Instead, select "Options".
5. A new box opens that looks like this:
6.
We need to adjust the slider until we get a nice blend of the
edges but don't lose the image too much. I used a variance of
2, but this will really depend on your image and your preference.
Anyway, your image should look something like this (resized
for economy):
7.
Now we are going to sharpen up the edges. Go to Format-->Tone
Map. This box will pop up (resized):
8.
To sharpen your edges, slide the sliders around. Experiment.
Definitely read the help file to understand the power of this
tool. But to get you started, I increased the hightlight by
25, thus lightening the image and getting rid of some of the
gray fuzzies. This alone makes the image seem to "thin". So,
I decreased the shadow by 33 (to the left), thus increasing
the amount of dark colors in the image. There were still some
areas that seemed awfully gray, I played with the midtone until
I got a result I liked, which was at -42.
There you have it, one cleaned up clip art to use as you see fit!
Before and After
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