Friday, July 24, 2009

Tips - Changing The Size Of A Pattern

Sizing patterns to fit the wood you have on hand, or scaling patterns to fit, can be accomplished with a xerox copier. But if you have an image on your digital camera, scanner or your computer that you would like to make a pattern out of, here's a freeware program that will aid you in converting anything into a pattern,
located at http://www.irfanview.net/ With a bit of education on how this program handles images you too will be able to scale images to meet your personal requirements. for your carving needs...
Steps:
A. Load image.
B. With the left mouse button click an area outside your main image, hold down the button and drag. Notice the rubber band box around the image, and drag it so it is around the item in the image that you are interested in.
C. After the box is set go to edit and choose crop image. The image will decrease to the size of the box you made, if you are not satisfied click the curved arrow on the toolbar and try to crop the image to your liking. D. Click print,
From the print control panel you can scale the image to inches or metric measure. insure the preserve aspect ratio is checked or the image could distort. This will also keep the original width to height ratio intact. and show you how it will print on the size paper you have chosen.
E. If your happy with the size test print it, F. Up until now you have not changed the original file. You have only loaded and edited the original file. For a perminate change you need to save it. I suggest you name it "item"pattern.jpg or something other than the original filename, unless you want to perminately change the original image. In addition to cropping images there are other limited image editing capabilitys in this great little program. Check the programs help files and the web based discussion forum, they cover almost any solution you need...

3 comments:

Merryl Bustin said...

I've been using Irfanview for the past several years and agree that it's an easy program to use for patterns. Can't beat the price too!

Marcia said...

Thank you for posting this information. I need to check into that program a little bit more. Any idea if it will enlarge and print out in seperate pages if the pattern is over the 8.5 x 11 size?

Thanks.
Marcia.

Thomp said...

Marcia,

simple answer yes,
how to do it:
divide the image into quarters by cropping one section at a time, print it then reload image until you get all 4 sections printed, then physically cut out image and paste it together,

i made a crawfish image 3 foot tall once by using this method and quartering the image, then quartering the quarters, but its a little more complicated than that if you save all the images..