A Poor man's Guide to Silhouette Creation.
Ok here we go. I'll try to be concise.
Lately I'm having some success utilising two things...
A white background
And "Gamma"...
Gamma correction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
If you don't have it, download IrfanView...IT'S BLOODY BRILLIANT!...
IrfanView - Official Homepage - one of the most popular viewers worldwide
Scan an image, in BLACK AND WHITE MODE, not in colour. Alternatively, scan it in colour and send/save it to IrfanView and convert it to "Grayscale" (Click "Image" and then click "Convert to Grayscale") It should then look like this...
I have an old (8 years) Lexmark scanner and it has an editing suite. In there is an "Image Adjust" folder and in that, an area you find things like brightness, contrast and "GAMMA". I'm sure all scanners would have this somewhere.
Again, alternatively, it's in IrfanView. Click "Image" and then "Color Corrections" (It's an American programme). By adjusting gamma to the left, slowly, it will start to blacken and look like this...
Any area not black can be easily retouched with a "paintbrush". Again, best in Irfanview...click "Edit" and then "Show Paint Dialog". The beauty of this is that the paintbrush, line or eraser can be adjusted from the size of a pinhead to a clenched fist, something I can't do with the Lexmark edit suite.
It's not perfect and I'm having no luck with photographs. I've also found that profiles taken from the internet don't work as well as scanning due to scale I suspect...
See here, a "sawtooth" line appears on the image...
Gotta say that IrfanView is BRILLIANT at sizing the image to the exact pixel size the user wants.
That'll do for now. There's lots more but this e-mail is getting to big.
Please, please let me know how you get on, good or bad.
Cheers.
Graeme