Stitch Era - digitizing a portrait photograph

Introduction

This beginner's tutorial for the Stitch Era embroidery software expands on Stitch Era - creating embroidery from raster images and Stitch Era - digitizing complex bitmap images

Tutorial home page

Stitch Era embroidery software

Learning goals

Be able to import vector graphics or bitmap files

Be able to vectorize a bitmap file, i.e. turn it into a vector graphic

Be able to digitize a vector graphic

Prerequisites

Stitch Era embroidery software (in particular be able to create a new design).

Related pages

none

Materials

You can reuse the pictures. In the wiki, click on picture to make it larger, then click again and save it.

Quality and level

This text should technical people get going with Stitch Era. I use it for an optional master degree course in educational technology.

Last major update

September 2011. Since then some features e.g. file import was improved. Also the menu organization did change somewhat. We will try to fix this in some near future - Daniel K. Schneider (talk) 15:59, 17 August 2017 (CEST)

Next steps

• Stitch Era - adjusting stitch sections explains how to change parameters embroidery sections, e.g. stitch density, fill patterns, etc. after and auto-digitizing procedure.
• Stitch Era - creating embroidery from raster images. Create embroidery from simple and relatively clean raster images (e.g. *.png or *.jpg files)
• Stitch Era - vector graphics. You don't necessarily need to learn how to draw vector graphics that you then can convert to embroidery (stitch sections). However, you will be able to speed up your work and you also could reuse principles (e.g. Bezier drawing) for manipulating stitch sections as well as in other multi-media programs.

Digitizing images is very difficult. Digitzing portrait images is a bit easier that digitizing landscapes. The basic principle is:

• Reduce the size of the picture to the size of the picture you want to stich or less, e.g. 1000px (equivalent of 10cm in Stitch Era)
• Modify contrast, saturation and luminosity so that the person's feature stand out best.
• Reduce to 16 to 20 colors, then union the colors
• Vectorize with some hole filling and smoothing values
• Remove holes from vector objects and union little vectors

Reduce the picture size

Before importing to Stitch Era, reduce the picture to a reasonable size, e.g. 1000px width. 100px will be shown as 1cm in Stitch Era which is not the standard conversion rate on a low resolution screen.

We shall start with picture of myself since I do not want to be sued by angry people not liking their embroidery version....

Portrait of Daniel K. Schneider - click to enlarge to the original 1500 X 1000 px picture size

Import the picture to Stitch Era (ARTWORK -> Open Image). As you can see in the screenshot below it will be adjusted to a size of 15cm x 10cm.

Reduce colors and remove small areas

In a next step we suggest bringing out colors a bit. Increase both saturation and contrast a bit. This (optional) operation will hopefully make it easier to distinguish between certain features. To do so, select the picture in the workspace, then click on the IMAGE tab.

Portrait of DKS - Color enhanced

Now we will reduce colors. Select the picture, then open the LAYOUT tab. As you can see in the first screenshot (above), to the right there is a color reduction tool. Open it now. We will attempt two things:

• Remove very small areas
• Reduce colors without loosing important features.

Small area filters

• A small areas filter of 20 took too much of the facial features (e.g. beard) away
• 10 is probably a good compromise. The glasses are almost gone, but there is not much we can do about this, i.e. in any case we will have to redraw these. If we do not reduce small areas, vectorizing and dealing with thousands of little vectors will be a nightmare.

Colors

• We want to keep the blue shirt and for that we have to keep 20 colors

Portrait of DKS - Color reduction tool

Save the file, then save the file as new copy.

Vectorize

The vectorizer tool let us doign three thing in that order

• reduce colors and remove holes
• merge colors
• vectorize according to three parameters

Merge colors

In this step we will again reduce colors and remove small areas. However, instead of letting the machine reducing colors we will merge colors.

Click on the picture and open the Artwork/IMAGE tab. In the ribbon menu to the right click on Convert to Vector. In the Vectorizer tool that is now open, click on Filter (we already did reduced colors and remove holes). We now will attempt to reduce the 20 colors in the palette. Since there is no undo in this tool, you may have to restart more than once.

• Set reduction to 256 colors (we only have 20, but the tool does not allow to set 20).
• Set the transparent color to nothing.

Now click on the Filter icon and you will see the "cleaned" result.

Portrait of DKS - Vectorizer tool

Now combine as many colors as you can. CTRL-click on at least two colors, then click on the Combine icon.

Vectorizer - combine colors

• I "Bundled" all red and brown colors
• all dark grey
• all middle grey
• all light grey
• all beige
• etc.

The following screen shot shows 9 colors left and much larger uniform areas.

Portrait of DKS - Vectorizer tool