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Dave Johnson29
10-22-2008, 12:11 PM
Hi people,

I have been messing with photos and too cheap to buy Photgrav. I discovered a "Jarvis" option in Corel PhotoPaint 10 for Mode then B&W conversion. I set the Intensity to about 50%.

Saved it as a JPG then opened a new page and imported it back in and used Blur to soften it. Can't exactly remember which "Blur" though. I had to Import it back in as Corel would not let me apply any Effects after the Jarvis conversion.

The brown colored pic is on hardboard and the blue one is on the back of a mirror. I have not quite got the hang of power etc for the mirror but I think it is OK for a first try.

I will mess some more with Corel to get finer dots in the Jarvis conversion.
Darren Null
10-22-2008, 1:23 PM
I would advise you to go here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dithering
...and read the 'Dithering algorithms' section, about 2/3 of the way down the page. Personally, I believe you get far superior results with the Floyd-Steinberg algorhythm...you don't get the 'snakeskin effect' with F-S.

Saved it as a JPG then opened a new page and imported it back in and used Blur to soften it.
What you've done there is taken a dithered image and added grey shades to it...thus forcing your printing software to either guess between black or white for each pixel, or to re-dither the whole image. You cannot possibly improve things like that, and could make the image worse.

Photograv isn't your only dithering option. about $30 will get you this:
http://www.flamingpear.com/indiaink.html

$119 will get you this:
http://www.andromeda.com/main/etchtone.php

Photograv is best, etchtone second, india ink 3rd. All better than the native dithers available in corel.

Free dithering (but you need photoshop) search for 'Gold Method' on this forum. I'm sure that the methods can be adapted to photopaint with a little messing around, but there's press-and-go actions and scripts for photoshop available on this forum.
Dave Johnson29
10-22-2008, 1:33 PM
Photograv is best, etchtone second, india ink 3rd. All better than the native dithers available in corel.


Thanks Darren.
Bill Cunningham
10-23-2008, 10:02 PM
Free dithering (but you need photoshop) search for 'Gold Method' on this forum. I'm sure that the methods can be adapted to photopaint with a little messing around, but there's press-and-go actions and scripts for photoshop available on this forum.

The basic steps of the gold method that rodney posted a year or so ago, will work fine with corel photopaint..