Changing colors in a graphic

[gcellison]

Happy Saturday to all.

I’m writing to ask for some expert advice. I’m using P&GD17 to do some graphics work. (I’m still new to the software, but I’m pretty experienced in WDP.) My understanding is that its photo and graphics capacities are the same as for DPX, so hopefully someone can help.

The “original” image attached is saved as a jpg (for space concerns), but it is exported from a png. Same for the “first-attempt” image.

My objective is to recolor the elements (petals and letters) to match those of my theme. I am maintaining the file as png with a transparent background.

My attempt: I used the “Select colors to enhance” tool under “Photo enhance”. I chose a petal of each color, adjusted the tolerance and fade so that it would not impact any of the other colors, and then made manual adjustments to the saturation, temperature, and hue.

The result is not bad, and the tool seems to do a pretty good job with a graphic with a limited number of colors.

Problem 1 with my attempt: it is impossible to get the theme color precise (and at times, even close), despite trying many combinations of the manual adjustments.

Problem 2: around the edges of the forms there is a dark outline or halo of blurry pixels. Even when I dropped the tolerance and fade to 0 for each color, it was not eliminated. I even tried fiddling with the histogram (color by color), with the effect of simply turning the outline yellow-brown (and of course, completely messing up the color of the image).

So, any advice on a better tool or a better way to use the “Select colors to enhance” tool? 1) control the colors more precisely, 2) eliminate the pixel outline?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Acorn]

As the petals are stylised, it would be simpler to generate a colour palette from the image.
In XDPXv16+, you have Palette from Photo, but you can eyeball the required colours instead or if you have enough just work with your theme.

Then create a petal from the Shape tool: two cusped nodes with curves between.
You would then clone shape to each petal, the work of minutes. I usually have it at 0.25px Line width and 50% Flat Transparency to get the shapes bang on, then remove both for colouring.
Then add a solid palette colour or two in a Linear Fill.

Far more control and no blurring.

Acorn

[handrawn]

what i would do would be to use a copy photo - turn all the colours solid black - then vectorise it [bitmap trace] and recolour the vector shapes

however as xara's bitmap tracer is a black art I'd probably use inscape to do the trace

there is probably a way to do it with the photo tools in xara, but I don't use these enough to be certain...

[cross posted with acorn]

[gcellison]

Thanks @Acorn and @handrawn. I will start seeing how to implement your advice. I'll let you know how it goes. Cheers!

[mwenz]

Here's a quick start as vector. Your image is underneath the black vector shapes.

[gcellison]

A quick follow-up. I tried the advice. Some of it proved difficult for a novice; some of it proved difficult because of irregularities in the shapes. The bitmap tracer turned out some surreal results (a black art, as handrawn says). And though I have inkscape installed, I’ve never used it. So with the learning curve, that’s for another day.

What ended up working pretty well was: for each shape, I outlined it with the Magnetic lasso tool. While it was “crawling”, I copied and pasted it on a second page. Within the pasted group is a copy of the image, the visible shape, and an outline of the shape. I pulled the outline out of the group, made it visible with a color and 50% transparent, then played around with the outline using the shape tool until it was close enough to the original shape. Once all of them were done, I removed the transparency, added an outline, gave them a color close to the original, and then added an elliptical fill to mimic the highlighting texture in original drawing. Finally, I did the letters, which proved to be the hardest. They’re not perfect, but close enough.

Everything is now arranged by named colors, so tomorrow I can start playing around with using my theme colors to see how it works.

It was a lot of work, not perfect, but satisfactory for the internet. When it goes onto my website, it will look better than the blurry original that I downloaded from the internet several years ago.

Thanks again @Acorn and @handrawn. Your advice helped and inspired me.


P.S.
Thanks @mwenz! I just saw your post. If I’d checked back sooner, it would have saved me a lot of work. LOL.

[gcellison]

For anyone interested... using theme colors:

[Egg Bramhill]

Great work! I like the logo so I thought I'd try an animated version:

[gcellison]

Great work! I like the logo so I thought I'd try an animated version:

Wow! You put me to shame. Is that just with DPX / P&GD or did you use some other software?!

[Egg Bramhill]

Just Xara Designer Pro and it should be possible in any Xara product as far as I'm aware. I've attached the Xara file for you to look at and use as you wish.