For example here are 2 scans, one reversed. The white paint came off the wheel, so I was thinking scan it and recolor it and perhaps could print it and glue it on. But of course I have no idea how to recolor. I gimped it and it looks like you would have to painstakingly go thru this. Is there a way to tell gimp or some other program to color threshold a range of colors to white or black only?
Originally Posted by sdowney717 For example here are 2 scans, one reversed. The white paint came off the wheel, so I was thinking scan it and recolor it and perhaps could print it and glue it on. But of course I have no idea how to recolor. I gimped it and it looks like you would have to painstakingly go thru this. Is there a way to tell gimp or some other program to color threshold a range of colors to white or black only? That won't work because there are grey areas in your background that are darker than your scale marks. Furthermore, the border of the scale and letters contain grey pixels to make smooth lines (anti-aliasing). Going to two colors will make them disappear and these borders will have pixel-sized steps (and at the current size, you haven't got many pixels on the tick marks). Use the Threshold tool for this and convince yourself. All is not lost, but: take a very clean shot of the dial: from far away with zoom (reduces perspective distortion)on a background that contrasts with the dial (dark if white dial and vice versa)have the dial as big as possible (almost edge to edge)once in Gimp, play with contrast/brightness, this can be enough for most of the dial. But don't overdo it. The steps I warned you about above should be a lot smaller if the photo is big enough.repaint the rest by hand For a perfect result, I would do it completely differently, namely, redraw the whole thing from scratch using "paths". Letters are easy once you have the right font, and the tick marks can be generated in a spreadsheet program, so it's not so labor intensive.
I rescanned in line art with another dial where the white has not faded. However the image is too small compared to the original item???? original dial is 3 and 1/8 inch What prints out in GIMP is 2 13/16 inch. why is the size not right when I try to print this? So then I opened up the transform scale to enlarge, it appears to enlarge, but did not print any larger. I saved the improved version in a tz file. So you can open and see it looks much better now. namely, redraw the whole thing from scratch using "paths".? Please elaborate a little
Last edited by sdowney717; November 13th, 2011 at 10:44 PM.
ok, why is the printer shrinking the image?? paper is 8.5 by 11 and the printer wants to scale it down?
Originally Posted by sdowney717 ok, why is the printer shrinking the image?? paper is 8.5 by 11 and the printer wants to scale it down? See Image/Image properties. Your image is 8.533 × 11.772 inches so it won't fit on the page. Actually even at 8.5x11 it wouldn't fit because your printer won't likely be able to do border to border printing vertically so the printable area on the page is more like 8.5*10.5. On the other hand, the really useful part of your page is 3.2 inches in diameter so you can crop your image so that it fits and won't be resized (this will lead to smaller files, too...). For paths, see a pretty good tutorial: http://limn.0fees.net/2008/06/15/gim...tool-tutorial/ The idea is to define a path that creates a selection that is bucked-filled to generate the tick marks. This is often a much cleaner way to reconstruct a damaged geometric drawing (I've used it on old logos). It's less complicated than it seems once you figure out that you can obtain most tick marks by duplication and rotation. Another solution is to generate them mathematically (a path is just a set of points). However, you seem to have obtained a pretty good image of the dial, so there should be no need for this.
It can be a bit painstaking, but you can also use the select by color tool and pick individual pixels. You'd need to zoom the image probably to at least 4x or 8x. If the zoom is high enough, you can click on a pixel you want to change, then use Select by Color. You can then use the fill with foreground or background color option to switch the selected pixels to color you want. If you add an alpha channel to the image, you can simply "Clear" the selected pixels and make them transparent.
not easy for me to figure out cropping although I understand the idea. Anyone want to tell me how to crop this thing? http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tutorial-quickie-crop.html following this I somehow managed to crop. But I dont see this dialog box with aspect ratio. Well, I just printed the cropped image and it still comes out too small. it prints the same thing as before. So what should i do? here is a screen shot showing the cropped image OK, I think I got it, yes that worked doing the crop. But I did not see any dialog aspect ratio box.
Last edited by sdowney717; November 14th, 2011 at 12:36 AM.
hey thanks, the crop size made it print the exact dimensions. Now I tried printing with my HP laser jet, but my black is not really solid black. It looks good but could be better. I tried the enhanced settings etc... which made a small improvement. Could a copy machine take my print out and enhance to full solid black? Or how could I print this and get a real good quality black AND could it even be printed on something other than paper? This goes in a tachometer which gets sunlight falling on the tach. I was planning on cutting out the paper image and gluing it onto the face plate.
tintii might be worth a try.... http://www.indii.org/software/tintii There is a linux version. and another ppa here https://launchpad.net/%7Edhor/+archi...mo=75&start=75
Originally Posted by sdowney717 hey thanks, the crop size made it print the exact dimensions. Now I tried printing with my HP laser jet, but my black is not really solid black. It looks good but could be better. I tried the enhanced settings etc... which made a small improvement. Could a copy machine take my print out and enhance to full solid black? Or how could I print this and get a real good quality black AND could it even be printed on something other than paper? This goes in a tachometer which gets sunlight falling on the tach. I was planning on cutting out the paper image and gluing it onto the face plate. The best thing (contrast- & longevity-wise) would be real photo paper. Try your usual photo print shop. But you may need a couple of calibration trials, I don't know how well they stick to dimensions/definition. Or figure out the rectangle which is 6"x4" in your image and crop to that around the dial. They usually scale, but don't change the aspect ratio.
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