Hi Alf -

Check out the chrome-text tutorial at the gug website:

http://gug.sunsite.dk/tutorials/tomcat16/

The basic trick is to select the item(s) you want chromed, fill them with a gray to gray gradient, blur, bump map, and then twiddle the curves to get a chrome/reflection effect.

See also GGJ's neat reflection tutorial at

http://200.195.195.206/ggj/reflection3/reflection.html

These should give you some good ideas about how to proceed. Just use your own selection instead of text.

HTH,

Hi,

I have a problem with the outline of a scanned scripture. The scripture was made with a pencil - therefore it is not compact and quite rough.

You can see a part of it as an example on http://www.hagoschaos.de/gi27/line.html

Image 1 shows the lines, how they are now. Image 2 shows, how I want them to be.

This little part I made by hand, but I cant do that with about 60 words. So, how could I do it?

Regards Hago

Hago Ziegler writes:

The scripture was made with a pencil - therefore it is not compact and quite rough.

You can see a part of it as an example on http://www.hagoschaos.de/gi27/line.html

One way to do it:

1. Run a Gaussian Blur on the picture. 5px should be good, but try other values here.

2. Select by color, fuzziness around 120. Select a black pixel. Try other values.

3. Create a new layer, fill the selection with black and switch of the background layer.

Problem: The more blurring you apply, the smoother thin lines will look, but at some point the "holes" within the characters will shrink too much.

[x] ulf

Hago Ziegler wrote:

Hi,

I have a problem with the outline of a scanned scripture. The scripture was made with a pencil - therefore it is not compact and quite rough.

You can see a part of it as an example on http://www.hagoschaos.de/gi27/line.html

Image 1 shows the lines, how they are now. Image 2 shows, how I want them to be.

This little part I made by hand, but I cant do that with about 60 words. So, how could I do it?

Regards Hago

I do not know if it will be perfect, but I think this could be a step in the good direction.
Select->By color, then grow the selection (Select->Grow) by a number of pixels, and shrink it by the same number afterwards. It is kind of a cheap erosion-dilatation or dilatation-erosion.

This correponds also more or less to the use of blur filter on the channel corresponding to the selection. But this is more complicated to do.

The other way would be to use a filter like a closing filter of the ipx plugins
http://ipxplugins.sourceforge.net/samples/rank-order-filtering.html

If you use windows gimp, these opening/closing filters are in Filters->IPX (you need to install the additional filters). They were previously here http://www2.arnes.si/~sopjsimo/gimp/ (page of Jernej Simoncic) but I can't find them anymore :-/ Maybe they have ben integrated in the main archive?

Regards,

Olivier.

Hi Oliver and Ulf,

these more conventional methods, using different ways of blurring, I had tried already. The best I could achieve was: http://www.hagoschaos.de/gi27/line.html - image 3, and the initial "B" then becomes like image 4.

Not very satisfying :-)

The plugin I still have to try. Thanks to both.

Regards Hago

Hago Ziegler wrote:

Hi Oliver and Ulf,

these more conventional methods, using different ways of blurring, I had tried already. The best I could achieve was: http://www.hagoschaos.de/gi27/line.html - image 3, and the initial "B" then becomes like image 4.

Perfect! It is gray, not black! Just use Image->color->levels and change all the grays to white...

Not very satisfying :-)

The plugin I still have to try. Thanks to both.

Regards Hago

Have you tried frontline and autotrace? http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/
you'll have to play with the parameters, but it should work. Of course, the final image will be vectorial, not raster.

Regards,

Olivier.

Alf C Stockton wrote:

The above dialog got me thinking about my Fuji MX-2700 and the program I use to download my images to my Linux system, which is fujiplay, via RS-232. This program by default saves images as *.jpeg and I believe that jpegs are lossie and therefore that I could be loosing some quality. Is this possible ? I do not believe that the image on the camera's SmartMedia is jpeg

Yes it is. The SmartMedia card is DOS-formatted and the MX-2700 writes JPEGs to it.

You have the option of removing the card and using a USB SmartMedia card reader (at least one that makes the card appear as a standard USB Mass Storage device) and then mounting the filesystem or using mtools to copy the files off the card.

JPEG (lossy) compression will have been applied when the camera saved the file. Copying the file (via the serial cable or via a card reader) should simply copy the bits, and you shouldn't be facing any additional quality loss.
__
David Burren