Phantom Hourglass pattern assistance, please

[skater43]

After much deliberation and such, finally decided on which picture I want to do to represent Phantom Hourglass (see attached). So now it's a matter of putting together an actual pattern to stitch. Concern 1: going off the png is fine, I've done that frequently in the past. However, zoomed in to 800% , which is what I typically do since we're doing 1 pixel = 1 stitch, things look rather blurry. Is that just blowing things up and actual picture will come out fine? I threw the png in KG-Chart and got the other attached file. Think I put in max of 32 colors and it spit out a pattern with 27. Does that look good? That a better option to stitch off of rather than the png (I guess it's better in that colors have been assigned, whereas png, I would have to decide/pick the colors myself)? Any other suggestions, comments, etc.?

[blackmageheart]

The blurriness is mostly due to resizing rather than zooming - because it's been resized to be quite small it loses a lot of details (especially in Linebeck's face but also anything small like the rivets in the boat etc.)
there's not a *lot* you can do about that if that's the size you want it to be, you can do stuff like draw in details or remove extra colours etc (like with the Spirit Tracks piece, I redrew nearly all of the image to "clean" it up)

the KG chart pattern seems slightly better but 27 colours is nowhere near enough, PCStitch had the image having ten times that number! of course, that's likely lots of confetti stitches or some colours having one or two stitches in that colour. but too few colours loses yet more detail

I'll try putting it through some different programs and see what I get!

[skater43]

I appreciate that. Strictly speaking, number of colors doesn't matter other than what looks good. I use 30 colors or 130 (okay, that might be a bit much ), I have lots of threads and can easily get any others I might need. If it helps, attached is the original picture I snagged. 150x105 is a good size I think, so that's what I resized to and would like to stick to. Little bigger makes a significant difference in terms of clarity and all, we can discuss that/see how much a difference it makes and such.

[blackmageheart]

I had a little mess around with it, but I've not been able to get on for a couple of days so forgive me for making you wait!

I know you wanted to keep it relatively small so I tried some different sizes and found roughly 180w to be the best trade off - keeping it small-ish while just having a few extra details in there. Also messed about with colours a little bit to see what difference it could make.

Anyway here's a little preview of what I came up with at 180x126 (I think it was 126!) with just a tiny bit of manual editing and colour reduction:

Spoiler

Spoiler

obviously there would need to be a lot more tidying up of the edges and such (very much like what Spirit Tracks needed) but hopefully you get the idea!

[skater43]

Looking good. 180x is certainly doable. Spirit Tracks was 180x180, so this will be a bit smaller in not being as tall. And I won't have to stitch all the white background, so that'll save a lot of time relative to ST. Don't sweat that it took a few days to do this; I appreciate you taking the time to mess with it. And we're a couple months out from starting it, too as we knock out our GDQ projects. Once done, getting the threads and such is fairly easy/doesn't require a lot of time, even if I have to order stuff. Making the pattern is the time consuming part (well, stitching it is. Please don't take 300 hours designing this pattern ), so once done, the rest of the prep work will go fairly quickly. But yeah, liking what we've got going so far for sure.