removing color from a vectorized picture...

[Tallis]

hi everyone

i'm trying to make a shirt design and took a photo of a bird, then bitmap traced it into a vector. it's in color, and has browns and grays and some other colors.

my t-shirt is only 1 color ink, and so I want to boil this down vector to grey-scale

i put a black rectangle over it, and used a saturation transparency which took out the colors. but the background is a mock shirt- it's a a jpg below the bird representing the t-shirt as it will look printed. the rectangle covers more than the irregular shape of the bird, and as it extends over the t-shirt background, it giving it a yellow-ish or blue-ish overtone (depending on if the shirt is black or white)

i tried grouping the bird and the black saturation transparency square , and it doesn't do anything to prevent the square from acting on the shirt below, and discolouring it.

is there a better way to make a multicolored vector into gray-scale?

thanks
ps- it's too late to go back and make the photo B&W and redo the bitmap trace as there was a lot of adjusting to improve it after-- i figured there must be a smarter (quicker) way.

[Soquili]

Hi Tallis,

Create a bitmap copy using Truecolor+alpha color depth. Then you can set the contone dark or light to make the copy grayscale.

[Tallis]

Hmmm. The printer told me it's much better to keep everything vector, and so I don't know how it will be received on his end if I take a bird vector (which I vetorized partly for art, partly for ease of his printing) and then make it into a bitmap again... I'll check. Thank you.

[itsfransie]

You have several options for this one:

1) Select and group all parts of the bird. Put the black rectangle over it and select both the bird and the rectangle, and apply a clipview (Q by default).

2) Make sure all bird shapes are ungrouped. Go to the Name Gallery and use it to select a color that is not greyscale. Replace it with the desired greyscale color. Repeat for all other colors in use.

3) Use Soquili's method.

Option 1 is by far the easiest option imho.


Frans

[steve.ledger]

Another method. This allows you to resize the vector drawing even after greyscaling.




► FULLSCREEN or DOWNLOAD 1.48mb

[Tallis]

Never thought of the live effect tool. Bloody hell. It's like my wife hearing me ask "where are my glasses" and they are on my head...

The power of xara. So powerful, sometimes you forget where your glasses are...


Thank you.

[gwpriester]

That reminds me, has anybody seen my glasses? Oh, never mind, I'm wearing them.

[ankhor]

I always have to ask myself, are they half fool, or half hemptea.
Ah never mind.