Pixel Screentones

**molucca** · 03 July 2006, 01:54 PM

As a fringe in EGD. Grayscale can be colorized, and the white shifts to transparent. Rich

**Grafixman** · 03 July 2006, 02:23 PM

Wow, Sally, looks like your vacation fully recharged your batteries.

. Great works. Also saw the one you posted on the Corel Draw forum. Gotta try fooling around with Photopaint if I can muster the energy. But frankly, the interface drives me nuts...
Rich, I am awed by the things you can turn to brushes in Expression. Converting to jpg might not be the best choice, though, because of the noise introduced. Maybe png or bmp perhaps? But I see that the latest release works with gif, as you said. Very cool.
Glad you folks are having fun playing with them. Me, I'm still waving the mouse around without anything worthwhile appearing

.
One drawback with these screentone images is that the thumbnail images in the windows file browser are messed up terribly. So I'm not sure about Sally's remark on the scalability of these tiles. Seems to be tricky business for me. They scale properly only on some percentages, but gets messed up on others. Or maybe I'm missing something here....

**molucca** · 03 July 2006, 09:08 PM

Map fills and paper texture in EGD.

Rich

**sallybode** · 04 July 2006, 06:27 PM

Originally Posted by Grafixman

Wow, Sally, looks like your vacation fully recharged your batteries.

. Great works. Also saw the one you posted on the Corel Draw forum. Gotta try fooling around with Photopaint if I can muster the energy. But frankly, the interface drives me nuts...
Rich, I am awed by the things you can turn to brushes in Expression. Converting to jpg might not be the best choice, though, because of the noise introduced. Maybe png or bmp perhaps? But I see that the latest release works with gif, as you said. Very cool.
Glad you folks are having fun playing with them. Me, I'm still waving the mouse around without anything worthwhile appearing

.
One drawback with these screentone images is that the thumbnail images in the windows file browser are messed up terribly. So I'm not sure about Sally's remark on the scalability of these tiles. Seems to be tricky business for me. They scale properly only on some percentages, but gets messed up on others. Or maybe I'm missing something here....

Gman,
I know .gif format can be scaled in a true vector program because it does not dither out. However this is probably only apparently true when you scale it in a program that can hold the ratio of height and width correctly. If scale is like in Photoshop where you have to hold down shift to get it proportional, it could do all over the place and Photoshop is a pixel editor. But in a CorelDRAW, it is scalable. It behaves this way also in Adobe Illustrator. In Photoshop, so long as you do not scale it with edit handles which means you have converted it from index color (in which you have very few tools which will work including manual scaling) by changing its image size height and width, it retains its sharp edges but it screws the pattern up a little. In PI, so long as you scale it by its image size, it remains true, the minute you scale it as an object, it can pixelate. In Xara, it is imported or opened as a bitmap and it is a very smooth bitmap, but no longer the checkerboard of squares. It is handling the information differently. In PhotoPaint, it enlarges when using the resample command pretty well. And pixelates if you drag its corners once you have promoted it to an object and enlarged the paper.

Xara, in this case is apparently viewing all index bitmaps as .jpeg or .png since it is automated to change vector to .png rather than any other format. This is my guess. And once open on the desktop, you can use it as a bitmap fill however, it is pixalated as a .jpeg. DRAW can trace it perfectly however and the result can be saved and imported into Xara as .wmf which is the easiest, I think. When I imported the Geisha text that wouldn't display correctly I changed it to .wmf and imported it to Xara. Xara, like anything else, has its own way of looking at artwork. This is neither good nor bad. It is different from DRAW and Illustrator on this.

However it there is a plugin that Xara recognizes and that plugin calls for a texture and can use a .gif, then it would mostlikely display as expected as it is using an interpreter.

One of the differences between .gif which is index color and .jpeg which is 256 color is that the .jpeg for the web is saved at 72 or for Windows 96 dpi. I didn't know this until this last year, .gif is resolution independent. You could save it at any dpi and you'd get the same .gif. The image size on the .gif is determined by the number of colors because it is index color. And these are saved at 1-bit which is black and white. In fact if you look at the resolution in PhotoImpact it doesn't even show a number.

It is an odd commodity.

**molucca** · 05 July 2006, 10:34 PM

Gman,

A WMF drawing I converted to map fills. Lots of bugs went to make this. Rich

**sallybode** · 06 July 2006, 01:47 AM

He may be too busy to respond, but I think it is wonderful.

Sally

**molucca** · 06 July 2006, 02:09 AM

The tiles work nicely as paper textures. Rich

**Grafixman** · 06 July 2006, 02:10 AM

Bugs?!

Converted to wmf....
So you mean those tiny pixel patterns are converted to vector shapes, or are they still bitmaps?
Sally. I am amazed at the depth of your knowledge on these things. No, I haven't really explored the behavior of bitmaps on vector programs, but your description on how various programs handles resizing is very interesting. Gotta try to understand them more deeply one of these days.
Something to ponder upon also is the resampling method used when resizing (bicubic, bilinear, etc). The results seems to vary and are more obvious with these tiny black and white pixels....
My printer is clogged up due to neglect. I wonder how these tiny patterns are going to end up if you decide to print them?
Or maybe there is a need for bigger patterns for printing?

**molucca** · 06 July 2006, 02:21 AM

I converted several old WMF CAD drawings to Expression format, and applied map fills. I used the tiles as paper textures. The dark shades in the tiles make transparent areas and the background shows thru. I can add various backgrounds for variation. As strokes, the white goes transparent, and the grayscale can be colorized. In erase blending, since the grayscale stroke becomes transparent, the dark shades will erase to whatever is below it on a layer.

I am using the tiles as GIFs. They work well in Xara, too.

Rich