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Can anyone help with cross stitch designers?

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stitchingkitten
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Can anyone help with cross stitch designers?

Post by stitchingkitten »

It seems like I've tried every program out there but yet the colors end up really, really off. For example, I could use a photo that only uses three very basic colors, lets say yellow, white, and blue, it will come up with a pattern using over 20 colors of pinks and green. It also ends up really funny looking if I try to limit the number of colors.

How does everyone seem to create such beautiful, large patterns with so little distortion?

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funkymonkey
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Re: Can anyone help with cross stitch designers?

Post by funkymonkey »

I usually edit my pictures in a photo editor first (photoshop, or Gimp is free) and use that to resize it to the number of pixels (stitches) I want. You can get some of the distortion out by resizing before you import. You can also decrease colors in your photo editor, then make sure you import to the same pixel size and number of colors as your original. If you're importing something like a photograph though, it will nearly always need to be touched up by hand in the pattern software. Depending how long you want to spend on that is how clean it will look.

stitchingkitten
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Re: Can anyone help with cross stitch designers?

Post by stitchingkitten »

How do you do both of those things in Gimp? :banghead:

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Kareesh
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Re: Can anyone help with cross stitch designers?

Post by Kareesh »

For resizing, I mainly just use the Microsoft Office Picture Manager. If you have that, click on Edit Picture > Resize and there are three different options of how to want to resize it. In GIMP, you click Image > Scale Image and then choose what size you want.

For reducing the colors in GIMP, I used johloh's how-to found here. It's helped me figure how how to reduce colors. There are some pictures I've had issues with where it's just been too compressed or something and you do have to go into your stitching program and fix it pixel by pixel.
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stitchingkitten
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Re: Can anyone help with cross stitch designers?

Post by stitchingkitten »

Thank you both very much for the information! I will have to continue to play around with the programs. I've tried all night and they still look like blobs, but hopefully with time I will make something remotely stitch-able!

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