Stitchboard Admin message #2
Creating a pattern
July 29, 2019 at 4:29:39 AM  (in response to Katelise6 message #1)
 

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Stitchboard Support message #4
Re: Creating a pattern
July 29, 2019 at 5:23:32 PM  (in response to Katelise6 message #1)
 
Hi Kate, and welcome!

Let me take a look at it and I'll get back to you in a bit...

Terry

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Stitchboard Support message #5
Re: Creating a pattern
July 29, 2019 at 6:01:48 PM  (in response to Katelise6 message #1)
 
Kate,

Here's a starting point...

I used the image from your message above.  When I ran it as is, I had a lot of background patterns, the colors were not right, and it was not filled in properly.

I'm assuming the background should not have that pattern so I used Photoshop to change it to a simple white.

Then I selected the Red Heart Super Saver palette since the default of Stitchboard Basic palette might not be the best since it's limited in colors.

Next I chose "I will choose my colors" in section 5c and checked the boxes 311 (white), 312 (black), and 341 (gray).

I then ran a pattern but it had a lot of breakups so I darkened it by changing the brightness to -23.

Here's the preliminary pattern it created.



It's not perfect yet but if you have a clean image without shading, you'd probably get a better pattern.

By the way, I told it to use the exact pixel count (section 6) so the program would not introduce any shading or other stray pixels when resizing.  Since you're doing a hat, you'd want a much smaller pattern.  I strongly suggest resizing the image in your art software and reduce it to the exact stitch count in pixels.  So if you want 20 stitches across, the image should be 20 pixels across.  I'm actually not a stitcher so I'm not sure exactly what count you'd want but if you give it a 1:1 stitches:pixels size, it would be best.  In this case, you'd select the "Use the actual number of pixels..." option in section 6.

You may want to try these settings with a clean image and see how it works for you.

Let us know if you need any more assistance!  And thanks for using the program.

Terry

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Stitchboard Support message #7
Re: Creating a pattern
July 30, 2019 at 12:13:23 AM  (in response to Katelise6 message #6)
 
Kate,

The issue is that reducing an image with this much detail down by an order of 9 (i.e. 189x189 down to 20x20) would lose a lot of detail.

An easy way to understand this is if you were to start at the upper left of your original image and look at every 9th pixel across and plot that on graph paper, you can see that you lose a LOT of detail.  For example, the left "crack" in the top of the skull is about 9 pixels wide and, depending on where you start, might not even be seen as you count every 9 pixels across.

Using this image, I think the only way it would work is if you first reduce the image size, save it as a .gif with only the 3 colors, and then manually retouch it with a graphics program to be sure the detail you want is in the image.  If you successfully create a 20x20 3-color .gif image, it will absolutely work fine with the program.

This is always an issue when doing a large reduction in image size.  It's not a problem with the program, it's just the basics of image reduction.

If it were me and I only had the 20x20 (400 total pixels) image and I really wanted to work it out, I'd go into a graphics program with a 20x20 blank image and manually just paint in the pixels I want.

You could also begin with the reduced size image in a graphics program and manually make a pixel-by-pixel correction since you only have 400 total.  My guess is that you'd probably need to change about 100 pixels or so.

There are companies that commercially use a version of the freePatternWizard to generate large to very large final art and they often need to do this manual retouching of the images.  They're sometimes starting with images that are tens of thousands of pixels wide and high.

Does this all make sense?  Let me know if you have questions.  We're here to help.

Terry

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