Charts-Is-Us
Do's and Don'ts for best results
We would like for you to know some of the things to try to avoid
when preparing materials for making a chart. A scanner does not see a
picture in the same way that your eye will see it. Your eye can see the entire
picture all at once and, therefore, many details can escape your
attention. The scanner, on the other hand, can see only a very small dot portion
of the picture at any instant, the size of the dot being no larger than one seventy second
of an inch square and can be as small as several hundreths of an inch square.
Certain kinds of pictures do not give good results when scanned. These include
pictures from newspapers, which are made up of small dots which are usually
larger than the dot area seen by the scanner at any instant, and another kind of
picture which is becoming very popular as a result of modern technology, is a picture printed by using an Ink Jet
printer connected to your computer. Ink Jet printers commonly use a technique
called "dithering" to fool the eye into thinking that there is more detail and
color in the picture than there really is. Dithering results in very fine web-like
lines being drawn using various colors in place of solid ink fill. If you examine
an Ink Jet picture closely, you can see the dithering lines but when you view the picture
at arms length or farther, the lines usually appear to be solid background.
Because
the area seen by the sanner at any time is so small, it can see between some lines either
totally, or might see the edges of two adjacent lines. If the adjacent lines
are not of the same color, the color of the dot seen by the computer might be
influenced by both colors. Such dots, when converted to stitches in a cross-stitch
picture can show up as speckles of a color that was not really there in the
original picture. And any speckles that show up in the cross-stitch result will
be the size of at least one stitch. It can be very upsetting to see your favorite
picture containing these speckles. About the only way to avoid these speckles
is to avoid using pictures that are dithered. Glossy sharp photographs or magazine
pictures printed on glossy paper work very well. If, for example, you wished to
have a chart made from a picture taken from a postage stamp, it would be best just to
send us the stamp rather than to try to create an enlarged copy printed by ink jet,
because we can adjust our sanning dot to be so small that we can
make the result appear that it was made from a normal size photograph - and there
won't be any speckles caused by dithering. And we WILL return the stamp to you.
Greeting cards usually work well also.
Another matter that should be mentioned has to to with the desired size of the
finished work in terms of stitch count. If a picture contains a lot of detail,
the finished chart should contain quite a few stitches in width and height because
detail requires significant numbers of stitches. If you look at some of the samples
which we show, you will notice that they contain a fair amount of detail,
and that they are fairly large in terms of stitch dimensions, the majority being
more than 200 stitches wide.
If we receive an order for which we feel that our customer might not be
satisfied with some aspect of the finished result, for example if we feel that
the customer might not be satisfied with the amount of detail obtainable when
we make the chart according to the customers specifications, we can temporarily create a private
web page to contain the result and then e-mail the customer instructions on how
to view the page so that the customer can give us the OK to complete the chart or
the customer can modify, or even cancel the order, if the customer feels that
satisfaction cannot be obtained.
We want your business but we want YOU to be
satisfied with the results.
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