Software to Divide an Image Into Discrete Patterns 109
slashyslashy asks: "My preschooler son is fond of color-by-number pages. We have already exhausted most of the online sites that offer somewhat limited sets of coloring pages that he can print to a paper and color. Besides, most of them offer extremely basic (read boring) sets of simple images (flowers, dinosaurs, etc). We were wondering if we can take any regular picture image and convert it into a pattern suitable (divide up the black and white picture into series of random patterns) for color-by-number pages. Is there any good software that allows converting a picture to a pattern suitable for coloring by numbers? Linux is preferable but Windows is also fine. Thank you."
Jesus H Christ (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Jesus H Christ (Score:5, Interesting)
Trace porn first, then colour it in. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Trace porn first, then colour it in. (Score:2)
So, is discreet a common synonym for discrete worldwide? They're two separate things here in
Re:Trace porn first, then colour it in. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Jesus H Christ (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Jesus H Christ (Score:2, Insightful)
Fucking asshole.
Re:Jesus H Christ (Score:2)
Sometimes parents have less-than-obvious reasons.
Could you at least spell-check the title? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Could you at least spell-check the title? (Score:2, Funny)
It came with my pea sea,
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rarely ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I'm shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect in it's weigh,
My chequer tolled me sew.
(Shamelessly stolen from, umm, who wrote this again?)
Re:Could you at least spell-check the title? (Score:1)
Re:Could you at least spell-check the title? (Score:1)
Re:Could you at least spell-check the title? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Could you at least spell-check the title? (Score:2)
Re:Could you at least spell-check the title? (Score:4, Insightful)
what the fuck is wrong with you?
Offtopic, maybe a little, but geez, it's a grade-school level grammar mistake in the headline, for fuck's sake. The editors deserve to be slapped around for it; they should know better.
And if you think that proper spelling and grammar are optional, well, I just feel sorry for you.
Re:Could you at least spell-check the title? (Score:2, Insightful)
Really? Is everyone on
Re:Could you at least spell-check the title? (Score:2)
I find this so-called "f-bomb" to be just another word.
Your mileage may vary.
Re:Could you at least spell-check the title? (Score:2)
Re:Could you at least spell-check the title? (Score:2)
And it did a pretty good job of expression what I was saying, IMHO.
Re:Could you at least spell-check the title? (Score:1)
discreet
Middle English, from Anglo-French discret, from Medieval Latin discretus
discrete
Middle English, from Latin discretus
How discreet do you need them? (Score:2, Funny)
Are you sure? People could watch you transform... (Score:2)
Re:How discreet do you need them? (Score:2)
Are you, by any chance, this guy [xkcd.com]?
(If not, I'd still recommend the comic for it's intelligent humour; some of the strips make me think before they let me laugh... (eg [xkcd.com]))
Re:How discreet do you need them? (Score:4, Insightful)
Possible approach... (Score:4, Interesting)
A program like photoshop with lug-ins and image processing / manipulation capabilities may do the job.
Scan an image, and using a combination of options such as color-reduction, "mattisify" (or others, e.g. Bas-Relief, etc), etc... may produce an acceptable result.
Good luck
Sam
Re:Possible approach... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Possible approach... (Score:1, Troll)
Re:Possible approach... (Score:2)
Or ... (Score:1)
I'm not sure that can be done, but ImageMagick [imagemagick.org] is a set of command line tools that allow you to do amazing things.
But the frst part could be Edge detection [gu.edu.au], from there you're on your own...
Re:Possible approach... (Score:2)
enough images (GIFs with large solid polygons, not JPEG photos) then you ought to
get good results. All that remains is to globally replace the dull gray fill.
If on Win32, InfranView can do Embossing for you.
Re:Possible approach... (Score:1)
Edge-detection usually produces the edge areas in white and others in black, so you will want to negate that image, and perhaps do more bit-depth reduction to get away with the greys. Perhaps a sharpen?
Quite easy to do but time is an issue (Score:2)
pimpin' aint easy (Score:4, Informative)
It's actually, both mathematically and computationally, a very difficult problem.
Image Segmentation [mit.edu]
I'm sure if you know how to do it, and write a nice paper, those folks will be very interested though..
A tip: most things that are obvious problems that 'no one has done' are actually quite difficult if you think about them for more then 10 seconds.
Re:pimpin' aint easy (Score:2)
From the linked page:
It's for a kid's colouring book. I don't think it has to be that accurate.
Re:pimpin' aint easy (Score:2, Interesting)
another one.. (Score:2)
you are wrong (Score:2)
bullshit.
>Then, you perform some sort of edge detection.
that simple, eh?
>it's not something there's much demand for
crap.
anyone who disagrees with this is welcome to perform the task without manual adjustments on one nontrivial, standard digital photograph and post the results and their method as a reply.
Re:you are wrong (Score:1)
And oh what it does for Winona Ryder's figure!
Re:pimpin' aint easy (Score:1)
Therefore, I am going to do the same.
Segmentation in "need pictures for my kid" and "medical use" are way different. While procedures described above (Gimp, Photoshop,...) work fine, detection and use parts of 2D/3D/4D datasets in medical and similar purpouses is way more complex. Today, You can see nice images from big vendors of medical equipment (Siemens, GE, Phillips, Toshiba, Hitachi,...) but all of the images that You ca
Re:pimpin' aint easy (Score:1)
Tip: Most 'hard' problems have really nifty approximate solutions that
Since when are Dinosaurs boring (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Since when are Dinosaurs boring (Score:3, Funny)
When I was a kid, they still roamed the Earth.
Re:Since when are Dinosaurs boring (Score:5, Funny)
Jurassic Park III
Quick (Score:5, Informative)
As always, you'll want to play with parameters to get good results.
Re:Quick (Score:2)
Inkscape (Score:1)
Re:Inkscape (Score:2)
Get it from you distributor (Ubuntu, debian ,gentoo, SuSE or whatever.) Pango is a font managing system GTK uses, so the errors are probably related.
Here it runs perfectly (Kubuntu). Awsome program... with the pace GIMP has these days, and Inkscape, and Blender.... all I need is the abilility to draw :)
Re:Inkscape (Score:1)
Saving Money (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, don't know any current titles (Score:2)
Google it (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Google it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Google it (Score:2)
It doesn't seem to be more advanced than what you can do with "detect edges" feature in your favorite paint program.
FLASH!!...BWAH..He'll save everyone of us... (Score:1)
In Macromedia Flash you can Trace Bitmap and it will tranform it to a vector image. Select each color piece, remove the fill and add a stoke color (to give it a border around it.) Add numbers and you are done, happiness!!!
image magick (Score:3, Informative)
Re:image magick (Score:2)
Two Options... (Score:5, Informative)
Second, you can keep it hardcore and use a program like NIH Image [nih.gov] (or its PC counterpart, ScionImage [scioncorp.com]) and use a procedeure called thresholding to get different levels of black and white from an image. The program is scriptable, and if you google around enough (or poke through the sample scripts) you might be able to hack something together pretty easily. I've used this software to track points glued onto soft tissues (ligaments), and if I recall correctly, it was fairly easy to get it to do this sort of thing (i.e., Biomedical Engineering undergrads were able to get it to work). N.B. This is a serious research-level program, so it is not super user-friendly. I also doubt you'll find anything in the help forums if you search for color-by-number. Search instead for thresholding.
The first option is likely to be waaay easier than the second.
Beat Me :) (Score:2)
Correction (Score:2)
Also I realized that the cartoon filter may be troublesome if one of the indexed colors in your picture is black. Here is an alternate procedure:
* Filter : Blur : Selective Gaussian Blur, with radius of 5-10 and Max Delta of around 16-128 (depending on how textured image is)
* Image : Mode : Index, with Generate Optimum Palette of 5 - 20 colors
* Image : Mode : RGB
* Filters : Edge-Detect : Sobel (vertical and horizontal)
* Layers : Colors : Invert
* La
Re:Two Options... (Score:2)
Re:Two Options... (Score:2)
Photoshop! (Score:5, Informative)
1. image->adjustments->posterize
2. filter->stylize->find edges
3. image->adjustments->desaturate
4. image->adjustments->levels, pull the leftmost triangle all the way to the right
You can skip the first step, but then it'll be reeeeally complex.
You might also want to scale your images up a lot before processing them.
Or you could use autotrace tools like Streamline, or the "LiveTrace" feature built into Illustrator.
Or you could pop up another layer over it and trace the image by hand, then turn off the original image layer and print it out.
Or, yeah, you could just go buy some coloring books, they're reeeeeeally cheap!
Re:Photoshop! (Score:2)
GIMP does it in two steps. (Score:2)
Cheap but not free, like the GIMP. So, let's try what you just did with five thousand dollars worth of software.
Woops, now it's just a cartoon that's already been colored. W
Re:GIMP does it in two steps. (Score:1)
Photoshop is definitely worth five thousand dollars but luckily it only costs around 600$
Re:GIMP does it in two steps. (Score:2)
At least you recognize that what you accomplished in two steps is not the same thing as what the OP accomplished in four. He took the color out. You didn't. I bet I can make the GIMP do in 1 step something that takes Photoshop a dozen, as long as they're two different things.
And as another poster mentioned, Photoshop isn't anywhere near 5 grand. In fact, the OP's method can be done with Elements, which comes free with
Re:GIMP does it in two steps. (Score:2)
> At least you recognize that what you accomplished in two steps is not the same thing
> as what the OP accomplished in four. He took the color out. You didn't.
Okay, how about:
- Filters>Artistic>Cartoon. Adjust to the level of black you want.
- Layers>Colors>Threshold. Set the number on the left equal to 1.
And for better quality, it helps on some dark or noi
Re:GIMP does it in two steps. (Score:2)
Re:Photoshop! (Score:2)
It's called Photoshop.
Or you can use the same steps with the GIMP, and save yourself $600, and run it on Linux.
Re:Photoshop! (Score:2)
Re:Photoshop! (Score:2)
Or you could use Photoshop Elements, which only costs $90 and isn't nearly as painful to use as GIMP's brain-dead interface.
To each his own, I suppose. I vastly prefer the GIMP's interface over Photoshop's.
(Especially on OS X, where GIMP is a X11 app.)
I use the GIMP on OS X all the time. It doesn't look like everything else on the desktop, but it works just fine. It's certainly not a difference worth $90 to me.
And the requested platform was Linux, which Elements doesn't support.
Color By Number Software (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:Color By Number Software (Score:1)
In my defense, I think the original poster was looking for advice about software. After reading a lot of self-righteous pontification from various paragons of parenting wisdom and virtue, I was in a mad rush to help the O.P. find the requested software.
It's called "image segmentation" (Score:2)
Wait, I think I found one. http://sharewareconnection.com/color-by-number.ht
Good luck.
Emboss (Score:2)
Bitmap to Vector (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe Illustrator.
Vecotrization seems the way to go.
Re:Bitmap to Vector (Score:1)
As with the other suggestions: trace the image (with a fairly large colour threshold, and possibly quite a lot of smoothing and de-noising), then select the whole result and give it a finite line width (depends on the size of the image, but not "thin") and no fill colour. The benefit of the tracing route is that - because the result is a vector - you can make a nice smooth
Potrace plus some stuff (Score:3, Funny)
cheers
p
Re:Potrace ... used by Inkscape (Score:2)
HTH
Edge detection (Score:2)
ImageJ (Score:2, Informative)
It is multi-platform, fairly fast and has a number of plugins and macros. If you find a combination of operations that work well, you can save it as a macro that a kid could probably handle on their own.
It is available at http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/index.html [nih.gov].
The website is rudimentary, but the program itself is fun to mess with.
Think outside the box (Score:2, Interesting)
May involve more effort then you want to put in (Score:1)
If the original images are starting off on the computer, just put an extra initial Printer stage in there.
Google cross stitch image maker (Score:1, Informative)
Don't get yourself sued (Score:1)