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Fabric Projection On Pattern - GIMP
Fabric Projection On Pattern - GIMP
- Gimp program
- A really good photo of your fabric.
Iron any major wrinkles out and take a photo by standing on a chair over
your fabric. Try to get as much in the photo as you can but don’t stress if
you get your feet in there or the colours don’t look perfect, we’ll fix them
up later on. My picture isn’t prefect but I know I can fix that up later on,
you’ll see.
I got this amazing jersey print from Potters
- A clean line drawing of your pattern. Scanned or camera picture
For my example I’m using dress 173 from the Manequim issue 621
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First of all let’s go over a few of the Gimp tools I’ll be referring to and where to find them (click images to
enlarge):
Free Select tool – this tool is great for drawing selections that
are weird shapes.
Crop tool – Just what it says, used for cropping an image down
to just what’s needed
Move tool – Use to move parts of an image about
Fuzzy Select tool – The most amazing tool in the world and it
is just a little bit magical, used for automatically selecting areas of the same or similar colour
Zoom tool – To zoom in select this tool and click on your drawing. To Zoom out again hold Ctrl and click
Scale tool – Used to change the size of your image (similar to ―Transform‖ in Photoshop)
In Gimp the Layers and History share the same window, you swap
between them using the tabs at the top
Layers Window – This is where you control your images layers. They
list here as you build them up in the image. For this example we’ll
only end up with two or three layers so it won’t get too complicated.
The darker grey layer is the one that is active so if you find what you
are doing to your image isn’t affecting the right layer pop over to the
Layers window and check that you have the correct layer selected.
History Window – If you make a mistake in any of the steps below you
can click back in the History list to undo it. You can also Ctrl + Z or
Edit > Undo to go back several steps but sometimes it’s easier to view these step using the History window.
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The first thing I do is prepare my pattern line drawing.
Open your patter image file.
Select File > Open and browse to your image, open it
You can see my image is a photo from the instruction page. It contains a
bit of text as well as the pattern line drawing.
Since I am only interested in the line drawing I am going to crop the image
down to just that.
Select the crop tool then click and drag across your image to enclose
only what you want left behind. The parts of the image that will be
cropped out are shown dark grey.
You can move the selection box around with your mouse or adjust it by
grabbing at each edge to fine tune the selection. Use the arrow keys on
your keyboard to increase the size by small amounts.
When you are happy with your selection press enter on your keyboard and your image is cropped.
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If you are using a photograph or scanned image like me you’ll probably find
your image isn’t perfectly black and white, this is no good for us because
firstly it doesn’t look very good and secondly when we use the Fuzzy Select
Tool to remove some of the white it’s just not going to work so well. We
need to make sure our image is truly black and white so let’s desaturate it
just to be sure.
Select Colors > Desaturate, click ok.
Even if your image looks black and white it’s a good idea to desaturate it
anyway.
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Now comes the fun part. We need to remove the white from the inside of the line drawing so we can see
through it. To make this easier you might need to enhance your image a little. If you scanned your image
from a magazine or envelope (or took a photo like me) it’s an especially good idea to make the black
darker and the white brighter.
Select Colors > Brightness-Contrast and adjust the sliders to improve your
image.
Subtle works best here, but if your image is particularly bad (like mine) you
may need to bump both sliders up quite high. Just have a play, you can slide
them back and forth until you are happy, you don’t want to distort the line-
work. This makes the next step that much easier.
You should reveal a grey chequered background, this is a good thing. Our layer
is now kind of floating over nothing. Now we are looking through the deleted
areas at that nothing.
You can select multiple areas to delete using the Fuzzy Select tool and
holding the shift key on your keyboard. Keep selecting and deleting
areas until you have them all.
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If you find an area doesn’t select very well or the Fuzzy Select tool
selects too much you can manually select these areas using the Free
Select tool.
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Right, now let’s sort out our fabric
Open you fabric photo image
Select File > Open and browse to your image, open it
Now you might not be happy with the colour or contrast of your fabric
image, we can fix this up using the following tools.
Select Colors > Color Balance and adjust the sliders to correct
any colour discrepancies. Again, subtle is best and the general
rule is that if you image looks a bit magenta, drag the
Magenta/Green slider away from magenta. If it looks a little
yellow, drag the Yellow/Blue slider away from yellow etc…When
you are happy, click OK
Select the crop tool then click and drag across your image to
enclose only what you want left behind. The parts of the image that will
be cropped out are shown dark grey.
You can move the selection box around with your mouse or adjust it by
grabbing at each edge to fine tune the selection. Use the arrow keys on
your keyboard to increase the size by small amounts.
When you are happy with your selection press enter on your keyboard
and your image is cropped.
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Ok, we’re nearly there, still with me? Good
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Now for a little bit of technical jiggery.
We need to just quickly check our pattern image size so that when we copy our fabric into it we’ll have a
bit of an idea of how much we need to crop it.
Select Image > Print Size
My image measures 12cm wide by 15cm tall, make a note of this, we’ll use that bit of info in a little bit.
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Now comes the proper exciting bit, we’re going to finally copy and paste our fabric image into our pattern
image and get the first glimpse of how it all looks, ohhh!
Right click on your fabric image and select Edit > Copy
Now right click on your pattern image and select Edit > Paste
Our fabric image appears but it is huge! We need to scale it down a little.
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We need to move our fabric about a bit and maybe even change its size.
Use the Move tool to further adjust the position of your fabric image and you can use the arrow keys on
your keyboard to fine tune it.
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You can see that I have positioned my fabric at the bottom of my image but it
isn’t big enough to fill the whole dress so I need more fabric to fill in the top
part.
I can with just make a copy of the fabric layer and reposition it.
Take your mouse over to the Layers Window and left-click on your fabric’s layer,
select Duplicate Layer
Now you have a second fabric layer. If you like you rotate this layer
(right-click Image > Transform) then use the Move tool and
reposition it to fill the leftover space
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One you are happy with your final image the last thing
we need to do is flatten the image so we can re-save it as a jpeg.
Take your mouse over to the layers window and right-click on one of the layers, select
Flatten Image