TheDhali: Good evening to those reading and looking to up their skills with graphic design.

This will serve as a quick start up pilot and link base to help you improve your skills with your graphics and also give you the ability to export your work once you are finished for professional processing.

RASTER:
The raster image (aka bitmap) is your everyday point and shoot picture. Its made up of a resolution such as 800 x 600  which means they set 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels high. A pixel is simply a square and it has a value of color. Together they all make up the image you see. These files are saved with extensions .jpg .png .gif .bmp etc.

TheDhali: You know the Dhali comes through with the Open-Source tools.. Behold… My choice tools in image editing.

Gimpshop 2.2.11
If you feel at home in Photoshop, but need an open source alternative - Gimpshop is the way to go. Gimpshop is a hack made on top of the original Gimp project which changes all menues, dialogs, etc.

VECTOR:
These types of images are usually saved as the standard .eps (encapsulated post script). This type of image takes coordinates on an x & y axis and then plots out the vectors along those guidelines. You may then change the color of the shapes you create out of the lines.

This format is usually requested when professional work is to be done.
Screen printing on shirts, logos for print, etc need the lines from vector art in order to reproduce the same drawing to any scale.

Note: In raster images the images are set when they are created. You may only reduce a raster image and keep its sharpness. When you try to blow up a picture it degrades. The original must be the highest quality possible. Soo. Vector graphics are the standard for any sign making, flash animations, shirt productions, unless they are going to press on some type of printed material. etc.

Inkscape 0.46
Inkscape is an open source 2d vector graphics editor. Supports all of the standard drawing features your will find in similar commercial product. Curves (bezier), lines, freehand drawing etc.

So.. Say you wanted to draw a picture.. And have it screen printed onto a shirt.

We need to produce. Camera ready art.

This is artwork that is provided by you and is “ready” to use.

TheDhali:
The fabricator, takes your logo or artwork and produces a “negative”.
Then they place that into a light box with the negative over a screen.
The screen is coated with a uv sensitive mixure that will harden when the uv light hits it.
The negative which is made of clear celephane and printed on with black to block the light completely.
Sometimes screen printers will create vinyl decal recreations onto the celephane to get extremely clean lines. Printing onto it could leave dropplets of ink that will show when screen printing.

SO.

Your first step is to bring your artwork into the computer.
Scan in at high dpi resolution. Usually for print 300dpi is best.

After we have a good raster image scanned in.
We have to convert this bitmap image to vector format.

AutoTrace: http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/

Also note: Now days Illustrator has a “livetrace” feature builtin. Which was introduced in version CS2 I believe. Depending on what version you get, you’ll want to look that up and research techniques on getting the best livetrace of your image you can.

Once you have the image close to where you like it you can take it into your drawing program (vector) and edit the points of the curves to make it finer. The bezier curve tool is most likely what you will be using.  Perfection is attainable.

When you have worked on all the points and everything is PERFECT.
You are ready to export the file for professional use.

Doing this before you go to get signage done, or banners printed will save you the set up fee, which is usually about 65+ dollars depending on what you give to the company to print. If you show up with a poloroid of your work, expect a hefty price tag on the setup fees. If you come with an .EPS file of your drawing, it can be made into ANYTHING. It is ready and standardized for production. 

Pro G!
The DhaliRama -
thedhalirama@gmail.com
Mario Florendo Castro
mario.progproductions@gmail.com
831-254-5404