Black and White image editing

[hebbardkennedy]

Hi everyone,

Hope it's ok to ask this as I'm a bit stuck. I tried googling but didn't find anything.

I do acid etching on metal and I need to take black and white patterned images, and super sharpen them. I don't know the tools to do this however. I need to zoom in and smooth edges out. Make sure the white space is totally white, and black totally black. Hope this makes sense.

Any advice is greatly appreciated, thanks!

 

 

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forums.

I think this thread https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/23232-1bit-bitmap-mode-colour-format/ might be of interest.

[hebbardkennedy]

2 minutes ago, GarryP said:

Welcome to the forums.

I think this thread https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/23232-1bit-bitmap-mode-colour-format/ might be of interest.

Thanks,

Sorry I don't really know what all that is. I just need to know what the correct tools are for the black and white re-touching or sharpening the edges.

 

Thanks

[GarryP]

Yeah, there’s a lot of chatter in that thread.
One particularly relevant post – from Andy Somerfield (Photo Lead) – was “I'll be honest here - we will never implement 1bit document support.” which kind of tells me that the 1-bit-specific tools you might need won’t be made available.
However, you might be able to use the Threshold Adjustment to get something done. Put the adjustment at the top of the layer stack and you might get what you need.

[DWright]

Hi @hebbardkennedy,

Is it possible for you to provide an example of the type of black & white image patterns that you are using for your etching 

[hebbardkennedy]

3 minutes ago, DWright said:

Hi @hebbardkennedy,

Is it possible for you to provide an example of the type of black & white image patterns that you are using for your etching 

Hi, this is the sort of thing I'd be using. This is maybe not a good example as it's very clear anyway. But something more intricate. I just need to zoom in, smooth the edges and make totally sure it has on grey in the white, etc etc. Does this make sense?

Thanks in advance.

[hebbardkennedy]

7 minutes ago, GarryP said:

Yeah, there’s a lot of chatter in that thread.
One particularly relevant post – from Andy Somerfield (Photo Lead) – was “I'll be honest here - we will never implement 1bit document support.” which kind of tells me that the 1-bit-specific tools you might need won’t be made available.
However, you might be able to use the Threshold Adjustment to get something done. Put the adjustment at the top of the layer stack and you might get what you need.

Thanks, I'll have to have a try sometime this week.

[GarryP]

You’re welcome.
It will be interesting to hear if you get any good results.

[DWright]

Below is a afphoto file with the logo I have applied an unsharp mask to smooth the edges and a recolour adjustment to change the white to a grey, as Affinity Photo is raster based you will not be able to get rid of all of the pixellation and get smooth lines when you zoom in 

black and white image.afphoto

[hebbardkennedy]

7 minutes ago, DWright said:

Below is a afphoto file with the logo I have applied an unsharp mask to smooth the edges and a recolour adjustment to change the white to a grey, as Affinity Photo is raster based you will not be able to get rid of all of the pixellation and get smooth lines when you zoom in 

black and white image.afphoto

Thanks. But what about when printing, will it be hi-res? I just basically need to smooth the black edges enough to make sure that when I print and transfer to edge, I don't get any obvious pixel lines.

[gdenby]

Hi, hebbardkennedy,

W/o seeing what you want to work on, I think it is likely that there will be lots of problems.

What is your source material? Is it a digital file that has been compressed? Those are likely to have lots of "artifacts" that have lots of grey noise at edges between B & W. "Jaggie" stair steps.

Using a threshold adjustment will give you a B&W image. In my experience, most images w. fine detail change shape slightly depending on the threshold setting. Fine lines in engravings can go from scattered black pixel smears to solid shapes w. minor changes in the threshold.  Sometimes it helps to add a small amount of gaussian blur, about .5 pixel, to average out edge features before subjecting them to threshold.

What you may want to do is clean up your pattern manually, and then change it to a vector drawing. Affinity does no do those, but the are good online free services for that, and some very inexpensive stand alone apps that do the job.

The results will most likely need some smoothing by deleting extra nodes

 

[hebbardkennedy]

Hi, I think 

On 10/22/2019 at 3:28 PM, gdenby said:

Hi, hebbardkennedy,

W/o seeing what you want to work on, I think it is likely that there will be lots of problems.

What is your source material? Is it a digital file that has been compressed? Those are likely to have lots of "artifacts" that have lots of grey noise at edges between B & W. "Jaggie" stair steps.

Using a threshold adjustment will give you a B&W image. In my experience, most images w. fine detail change shape slightly depending on the threshold setting. Fine lines in engravings can go from scattered black pixel smears to solid shapes w. minor changes in the threshold.  Sometimes it helps to add a small amount of gaussian blur, about .5 pixel, to average out edge features before subjecting them to threshold.

What you may want to do is clean up your pattern manually, and then change it to a vector drawing. Affinity does no do those, but the are good online free services for that, and some very inexpensive stand alone apps that do the job.

The results will most likely need some smoothing by deleting extra nodes

 

Hi, I think I discovered something.

This was a bigger problem when I was just dragging the image into a blank document.

If I created a background first and dropped it in, it wasn't as fuzzy.

Sorry for being a total noob on this!

Thanks.