Saturday, March 19, 2011

Graphically speaking

This is not a project on the boat... it is a project for the boat.

Do you have a logo for your boat?  You don't?  If you did, you could use it on your boat cards, boat stamp, tee shirts, etc.

Here's how to make one:
  • Find or take a picture of your boat against as simple a background as possible (empty sky would be ideal).
  • Load the photo into your favorite photo editing software (I use the Gimp - it's free).
  • Crop the photo down to the essentials: the boat.
  • You are going to use the software's "threshold" function to create a black/white version of the image.  If you still have items in the background or foreground that will survive that transformation, you'll need to remove them from the image.  I kept the wavelets and reflection in our foreground because I thought they added perspective and depth. 
  • With my software, the effect of the threshold function is better if the image is first inverted, so I invert the colors here.
  • Now use your software's threshold function.  You will want to play around with the location on the black->white continuum where the threshold is placed.
  • There may still be some artifacts after thresholding that you will want to remove.
  • That's it!  Save the image.  If you save it as a gif image, it will retain that hard-edged pixelated appearance.  As a jpeg, the edges will be blurred.  Picassa uses jpeg storage, so the image above has been blurred somewhat.

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