Stitch Era - photo-stitching

Introduction

This beginner's tutorial for the Stitch Era embroidery software tries to explain how to create embroidery from photos through a method called photo-stitching.

Not to be confounded with Image stitching where a series of photos is stitched together to form a panorama picture.

Tutorial home page

Stitch Era embroidery software

Learning goals

Be able to select and prepare a photo-stitchable image

Translate a picture

Prerequisites

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

Stitch Era - creating embroidery from raster images

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

Rough draft !

Last major update

Oct 2017.

Selecting a good picture

This procedure only works with a certain type of pictures

• The picture should have good contrasts,
• Its size should be between 10cm (1000px) and 16cm (1600px). Smaller will not work and bigger will run out of memory.
• The foreground (i.e. object to be identified in an embroidery) should well stand out.

Procecure

Enhance contrasts

• In a first step, try to enhance contrasts. In particular make sure that the foreground stands out as well as distinctive features of the foreground
• I suggest playing with contrast, saturation and brightness
• then reduce colors.

Create a digitized area

Select the picture, then enter photo stitching

• Select the picture
• EMBROIDERY tab, select Art to Stitch -> Image to Photo-Stitch

Photo Stitching tool

Select an area

As soon as you land in the "Area" tab you must select an area of the picture that will be stitched. You can choose to select a single area or several. Not selecting an area will not work. If you want to try digitizing a whole picture, just draw a rectangle from the Shape tool.

By default you will be able to select an area from the picture (click, click, click, .... and right-click accept). Alternatively, use a simple form in the Shapes menu to select an area, e.g. an oval, the click on Confirm and Edit

After drawing an oval, confirm and Edit

Before hitting confirm and Edit, you also could change parameters, but we suggest doing this later since you may need several attempts anyhow.

Play with the photo stitch parameters

Either in the ribbon panel on top or in the object manager, you now can play with all sorts of parameters. Before doing, so, untick Auxiliar on top right, so that you can better see the stitches. Hit F9 if you turned off automatic stitch generation.

Parametrize a photo stitch era - Workspace shows default

Several parameters can be adjusted (hit F9 after each change if necessary)

• Body pattern: You can choose between several color (Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-(Black) or white and black combinations. You even could exchange these base colors by others.

• Stitch "cell" size, Both horizontal and vertical length can be adjusted. By default 2mm are used. In addition you could adjust the "line spacing" (row) size. It should not be too large (default is 0mm, i.e. there will be no empty space.

• Color contrast: Defines how color bands will be translated to stitches. I do not really understand how this works.

• Black Contrast (for either B/W por CMYK models): Black color will be added in the range of "darkness" defined by "From" to "To", i.e. the area between the two sliders.

Parametrize a photo stitch era - Changed pattern to CMYK 1 and cell size to 1.5 x 1.5mm

In addition, you could change other parameters, e.g. add a border line.

Parametrize a photo stitch era - Border line

Links

• Lesson 3 Multi-Color Photo Stitch Designs, retrieved oct 2017.