Tips and Known
Issues
Tips
It's much easier
to see the source intensity of your
image by converting it to a grey image,
either by using your host application's
Greyscale function or using the companion
PhotoGrey plugin. If you change
the type of image to greyscale (256
colours) you also save memory, useful
for very large (print resolution) files.
Although the Sketcher
plugin provides versatile controls to
adjust the density and contrast in its
effects, often the quickest way to get
the look you are after is not to change
the plugin settings but to vary your
source image using the Brightness, Contrast,
Gamma correction and Histogram functions
of your graphics application. By just
using these functions and the Sketcher
plugins default .sms effects files you
have access to a lot of different images
from the same source.
Remember to use
uncompressed greyscale bitmaps for your
stroke maps and paper textures.
When creating
high resolution sketches for print,
high supersampling isn't necessary;
you should set Smoothing
to 4 at most. But you will need to increase
the scaling for each level media (stroke
maps and paper). Look out for updated
settings files and stroke maps from
Little Ink Pot designed exclusively
for print.
The settings file
"Halftone.sms" applies the
paper texture as a halftone pattern.
Changing the file can produces differing
halftone effects. To create your own
halftone patterns, create a greyscale
image with the highest value limited
to 230 (light grey) instead of 255 (white).
Known Issues
Though extensively tested
and evaluated to make it's use as problem
free as possible, as with all but the simplest
of software there are to be expected some
issues with the Sketcher plugin which might
mess things up a bit. These will be addressed
where possible in future updates, but until
then here's a list of the known problems
and how to avoid them.
There's a bug
with irregular sized media source images
which causes corrupted rendering of
the graphics data. This doesn't usually
become apparent in use as most media
images are saved in regular sizes, but
when creating stroke maps and papers
be sure your stroke maps and papers
are horizontally sized in multiples
of 4. eg. 640 pixels wide (= 160 x 4),
1280, 1600, 16 pixels wide etc.
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