Enhancing Picture Qualities

[gwpriester]

That's a good resource Steve.

[raynerj1]

when I did my Signature, I scanned it in as high an optical resolution that my scanner could do. then cleaned up the levels in PS (This was before 3.0). I then imported the .jpg into xara and did a greyscale trace. I then cleaned up the trace... Smoothed out the jaggies on the trace, and made the sig into 1 shape by adding/subtracting. I use it on many of my photos....

The attached example has been distorted so others will not be able to use it to forge my signature...

[steve.ledger]

That's fine John - If I wanted to pinch your sig I'd grab an undistorted version off of one of the many photo's on your site

[wizard509]

I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I have experimented with all the suggestions and still get jaggies, although minimal. I really don't know how to use trace it seems cause I never have any luck with that. I noticed that John's post has jaggies too. Well at least bumps where I thought it might be smooth. Steve’s tip on true color+alpha works very well and that seems to solve my problems of eliminating the white background. I like that suggestion. Thanks Steve John looks like you have it figured out.

[Giannis]

It still exports with a white background.

I happened to change the color of the bitmap to transparent, then the background gets, well... transparent, but there's also a degradation of quality. It's probably not the right thing.

I've done this several times before, I checked some old graphics (they were PNG by the way) where I've applied transparency.

I can't get why I can't get rid of the white background.

[steve.ledger]

Is it a bitmap you are exporting?
Because you can't create a transparent bg from a bitmap using the export dialogue. You need to make the white BG transparent first with something like MEHDI Eraser.
Then export with the PNG true color+Alpha

See examples

[Sammy]

Giannis

As Steve has already mentioned, in order to get a transparent background you have to make sure that you select True Color+Alpha option in the Color Depth box under Palette Options, otherwise you'll get a solid opaque background.

If you select just your traced shape and export it, it should work fine.

Seems to work without fail for me .

Sammy

[Giannis]

I didn't succeed for some reason to export the picture with transparent background but the MEHDI plug-in did the job well.

I wonder why I had to use the plug though.

[handrawn]

how did you trace it in the end? by hand, or with the bitmap tracer?
since if you traced by hand the background would have been transparent anyway I assume the bitmap tracer - greyscale?

if so you would need to either:

1) remove the background

or

2) select the trace then join shapes followed by break shapes


which works best depends on the trace

[handrawn]

just tried it - selecting the white background of the trace [ctrl+click] and deleting works best - join/break shapes still leaves you with a [black] background to remove so no advantage there