Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

Hi!

Does anybody know an easy, cheap and convenient means of converting a photo of the rotary wafer switch assembly I've attached below, to a simple line drawing, as would have been done in "Practical Wireless", etc., please ?

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

No I don't but I'm sure this question, or one very similar, was asked on the forum sometime with the last year or so.

B

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

Krita will do it under Linux.
I dont know about windows.

Joe

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

Can you post an example of what you are looking for Chris.

Edit: I tried it with a few online converters and it's a waste of time - it would be easier to draw it from scratch.

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

Or resort to the old-fashioned method of tracing paper.

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

This was done on an iPad, worth a try, space the components out well and take the photo on a white background or it picks up the grain of the wood surface.

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

I produced this wholly unsatisfactory image in a few minutes using GIMP (photo editor). However, it illustrates the importance of having a white background and even lighting when taking the donor photograph.

Alan

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

This is a bit tricky and will probably require a bit of retouching afterwards.

I presume by ‘line drawing’ you mean an image that looks like a line drawing albeit in bitmap format rather than a vector. It is possible to convert to the latter in Adobe Illustrator with varying degrees of success, though, of course, Adobe programs are only available on subscription.

Similar might be possible with online drawing programs.

However, the first issue with the image is the background which ideally needs to be clear and white and free of shadows and clutter to isolate what is required.

The second issue is that the photograph has poor depth of field which is throwing some areas out of focus. Sharp edges are essential.

The quality of original image is key because you in the best of circumstances you are asking something of a program that is rather difficult.

Other tricks to make the image work better through a conversion process are to adjust the contrast in an image editing program or adjust the individual colour channels as sometimes details are more visiable in these than in the composite view. Sometimes you have to take the approach of getting the most you can from the conversion and accepting that you will have to touch in the rest.

Unfortunately, a bit of trial and error is usually needed. A professional will often take the view that after messing around with a bitmap image (that is never going to be as crisp as vector) and doing lots of tidying and filling in it is faster to do the digital equivalent of tracing paper and trace over the image in a drawing program such as Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer*. It is possible that there are online/freeware drawing programs that have this facility.

*Only slightly relevant to this but for those that do a bit of DTP type work above and beyond what might be knocked out in Microsoft Publisher, the Affinity suite (Photo, Designer & Publisher) rivals the Adobe products and the programs are available under a traditional licence and are not very expensive. Furthermore, the company that produces them is British.

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

I have had some success using the Microsoft Photoed.exe program that used to ship with Windows until mid-way through the XP era, when it was replaced by the less versatile picture & fax viewer. Photoed has options such as Edge that produce outlines, the ability to select monochrome, posterisation to select the number of brightness levels, including just pure black and white I think it's available on the web, but following a suggestion on a "Bring back Photoed" forum some years ago, I simply copied the contents of the photoed folder from my old Windows 98 PC onto a USB drive and click the .exe file to run it.

I use the edge function to produce line representations of the perimeters of the tracks of printed circuit boards from digital.photos when fault-finding. This produces prints with black lines on a white background, allowing the tracks to be lightly coloured in by pencil and annotated with components and their values.

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

It can be done in Paint.net and probably most other multi layer drawing packages.

Open a new file in paint and make the picture the base layer. Add a new layer on top and use the packages suite of line drawing tools to trace the outlines of the components, wires etc. Delete the photograph and save the new image. One thing I do not remember is whether you have to do anything to the line image layer to make it the base layer. You can, however, save the 2 layer image and split them later.

Al

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

Whichever way you look at this there's a lot of work and skill involved. PW, PE, etc images will have been drawn by hand and I suspect that's still the best way to do it today unless you're a DTP expert already.

Alan

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

Pantograph ?

Lawrence.

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

Agreed, there's no way to do this with a filter in a graphics package, as most 2D photos don't have enough unambiguous info to tell the algorithm where to put the lines. Even doing it by hand on a computer will be very difficult without a proper graphics tablet.

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

A tablet and a stylus would be commonly available "second best". SHMBOs works posh ipad with "pencil" is quite amazing (it should be at the price).

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

The actual action of drawing using keyboard and mouse with software such as Illustrator or Affinity Designer is quite straightforward, though, of course, you have to know well the tools and techniques of the software.

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

This took about 7 seconds in Krita (Free and excellent) and would have been a thousand times better with an original photo on a white background and no shadow.

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

That's the effect you get with the EDGE setting in photoed.exe .

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

This is a single pass trace by Corel18 and saved as a PDF, no enhancements done.

The resultant can be saved as a bitmap or vector drawing

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

Could well be my iPad but page 1 has the original, the other 39 blank.

Re: Converting a Photo to a Line Drawing?
 

Hi!

I don't have a good digital camera any more but I can certainly retake the picture against a white background – how to get rid of the shadow, tho', I'm not sure!

I've tried a few of the suggestions in earlier posts and alas to say I wasn't very successful!

Circuit diagrams and PCB diagrams in "2d" I've got to a fine art, but not "3d".

Chris Williams