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The Right Arrow Project


When designing this board I decided to add a cute little "right arrow" to the "Custom Language Set" entry for location_boardlink.

Not being much of a graphics artist (in my own opinion) I went looking on the internet for a public domain picture that I could use as the basis for the idea. I didn't look for "icons" because I wanted to have some freedom in editing that just is not possible for me when the image is so tiny.

The picture I found was this one:

Image

It is plenty big so I have lots of room to play and the image already has a transparent background so I thought I wouldn't need to worry about that part in my project.

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Re: The Right Arrow Project


The first step in my project was to change the color of the arrow. The golden-yellow color of the original image is nice but I felt like it would be better to use a arrow that closely matched the purple/violet/pink pallet used in my box-shadows.

I used a program called PhotoFiltre 7 first since I am a huge fan of that program. The task turned out to be very easy here because PhotoFiltre 7 has a nice simple menu selection to do basic RGB channel color swaps (filter -> color -> Swap RGB channel). The very first default choice provided such a close match to what I was wanting to do that I just saved that image:

Image

 emoticon

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Re: The Right Arrow Project


This looked really nice so I decided to just do a simple "image re-size" to see what it looked like. Here you will see two images. The first is the "full size" image (20px x 22 px) to show what it looked like when going simple like this and the second is a "zoom in" image so you can see the jaggies on a image this small.

ImageImage

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Re: The Right Arrow Project


I called this my "working copy" which is really just my way of saying this picture can work to get things set-up while I continue to play with the image. I used a online png image optimizer called TinyPNG to get the file size down (50% smaller in this case).

Image

This is the image used on the board on February 12, 2014...

It also represents just about the limits of PhotoFiltre to do something like this if you have little or no graphical artist skills. It's not bad, matter of fact it's a heck of a lot better than some of the graphics I have seen on the net... The question is... Can I do better?

Last edited by Pastor Rick, 2/12/14, 1:52 pm


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Re: The Right Arrow Project


One thing I noticed while doing this was the sudden breakdown on the arrowhead. The top seemed to become much more jagged than the bottom even though the arrowhead is supposed to be (or looks like) it is a equilateral triangle. Would it look better if I edited it to show this idea? PhotoFiltre is really good at copy-n-paste functions so I decided to try that.

I also received the first email graphic for the board while doing this. The two graphics are not the same size but even so I am posting both of them. The first will be my latest editing attempt and the second is what I received via email from Lesigner Girl.

          Image Image
Image

As you can see, I am making good progress here, the jaggies on my little arrow are less noticeable than before so my theory about a image resize breakdown seems to be true. Even so, I think the image sent via email is clearly a better image when examined at +400% so I switched over to that image today.

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Re: The Right Arrow Project


A nice discovery. I forgot to change the width and height in my Custom Language Set entry when replacing my graphic with the one received from Lesigner Girl. The result was a image that is 19 x 24 was stretched/resized to 20 x 22 and I think that version is wonderful!

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Re: The Right Arrow Project


The biggest difference between what I created and what was sent to me (besides the image size) is the way the curves were rendered in the bitmap image. I decided to try using PhotoFiltre's "blur" tool to see if I could get a smoother looking curve. This is the result compared to the email image...

Image
Image

Last edited by Pastor Rick, 2/15/14, 8:10 am


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Re: The Right Arrow Project


The last result left me somewhat unsatisfied. The curves seem better but the definition highlights were gone. So I tried the "softened relief" tool to see if I could get the definition back...

Image

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Re: The Right Arrow Project


This is my last post on using PhotoFiltre for the right-arrow project. On my last version I used the "softened relief" tool to get some of the highlights back and then the "sharpen image" tool to remove the additional blur on the arrows tail. Last I used the "copy and merge" tools to restore the original color pallet between the highlights. I think this is about as good as a non-artist could do using this program. As a comparison I posted the project images at the start and finish and show a image emailed to me that was actually drawn instead of constructed...

First version: Image

Last version: Image

Re-sized to match emailed image: Image

e-mailed version: Image

Finding a true artist is obviously the best thing to do when possible but you know what? That last version I created is actually a lot better than most of the stuff I have seen. It shows you can make decent images for a board if you take your time and don't just settle for something because it was the best you happened to find. emoticon

Last edited by Pastor Rick, 2/15/14, 10:26 pm


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Re: The Right Arrow Project


So I was thinking... maybe you found the picture like I did but you don't have a image editor handy that you can use (like perhaps you are using a company computer). What can you do then?

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