Hago,

About the best technique I've found for doing something like that is:

1. use the select contiguous regions tool to select all the black 2. click the quickmask button in the lower left hand corner 3. use filters>blur>blur to blur the whole thing (aka smooth it, you'll have to blur it alot to get it smooth)
4. use image>colors>layers to sharpen up your selection 5. click the turn off quickmask button in the lower left hand corner, giving you a smooth selection
6. fill the selection with black

cheers! david millet
http://david.azdeveloper.com

__________________

David Millet wrote:

Hago,

About the best technique I've found for doing something like that is:

1. use the select contiguous regions tool to select all the black 2. click the quickmask button in the lower left hand corner 3. use filters>blur>blur to blur the whole thing (aka smooth it, you'll have to blur it alot to get it smooth)
4. use image>colors>layers to sharpen up your selection

I think you mean "levels" not "layers"

5. click the turn off quickmask button in the lower left hand corner, giving you a smooth selection

Working with the quickmask is basically the same as working on a channel, whcih I mentionned in the original post.

6. fill the selection with black

cheers! david millet

Regards,

Olivier.

"David Millet" writes:

1. use the select contiguous regions tool to select all the black

Since the "holes" of some characters (they must have a name that I don't even know know in my language) are a bit fragile and important, it could be a better approach to begin with selecting the outer background and leave the holes as they are. Quick try:

1. contiguous select background

2. grow by 2

3. bucket fill black

4. shrink by 2

5. select by color, additive mode, fuzziness ~ 90 on a white hole

6. bucket fill white

The result cound be improved a bit, but it looks promising. Instead of despeckling by growing and shrinking one might prefer the "distress selection" script-fu, maybe it gives better results.

[x] ulf

Hi,

things are getting better. See: http://www.hagoschaos.de/gi27/line.html image no.5

I got it with the GUG-tutorial. The only thing I don't like at this technique is, that original angels get rounded.

What I don't really understand, is what the quickmask is doing. When I follow exactly the steps that David Millet describes, I get no result. Am I missing still something, for example to activate the layer again at some point?

Regards Hago

Hago Ziegler wrote:

Hi,

things are getting better. See: http://www.hagoschaos.de/gi27/line.html image no.5

I got it with the GUG-tutorial. The only thing I don't like at this technique is, that original angels get rounded.

What I don't really understand, is what the quickmask is doing. When I follow exactly the steps that David Millet describes, I get no result. Am I missing still something, for example to activate the layer again at some point?

Regards Hago

The quickmask is just a tool allowing to work on selections. A selection in gimp is a gray level image. It can be saved as such as a channel (look in the select menu).
The interesting parts of this property are: 1- a selection is not just binary. Pixels can be 10% selected, 50% selected, etc. This is controlled by the feather/sharpen in the Select menu, and by the feathering options in some tools ("Select by color" comes to my mind).
2- it is possible to apply any filter to a selection! This is great, but not very known, mainly because it is not easily accessible in the interface.

Unfortunately, there are no esay visual way to work with this property of the selection. The marching ants only show a binary limit of the selection. With gimp 1.2 (well 1.1.x to be correct), the developpers introduced a nice visual way to handle this: the quickmask. The selection is represented as a coloured semitransparent layer that can be painted on top of the image. It is presented here:
http://www.xach.com/gimp/tutorials/quickmask/

Thus, one can say that the select->grow and select->shrink functions are actually more or less equivalent to applying a blur+levels or a dilate/erode to the channel/quickmask corresponding to the selection.

Sincerely,

Olivier.