How can I make a coloring book?

SS
Posted By
shirley_sidell
Jan 11, 2004
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375
Replies
10
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Closed
I have many drawings in black and white and halftone. I want to eliminate the gray (half tone) and clean up the images so they can be used by children for an on line (web) coloring book. They look pretty good in high quality, but when I save them for the web so they download in a reasonable time, the lines lose their crispness.

Any suggestions? Is there a program that will do this easily. I thought that Photoshop had a coloring book option but can not find it. I am using Photoshop 7. Thanks
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L
larry
Jan 11, 2004
Try Save For Web and save as a GIF instead of a Jpeg.

Larry Berman
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shirley_sidell
Jan 11, 2004
Thank you! I set the Mode – Duotone, Image Adjust – Brightness and Contrast and then put both bars all the way to the right. This make it look very clean and then I saved it for the web as a gif. The image looks clean and the title is right below the picture.
This might do it! Thank you so much, now to try some of the other images.
DM
Don_McCahill
Jan 11, 2004
You might also want to look into using PDF format for saving your images, to get a high enough resolution for printing out.
SS
shirley_sidell
Jan 11, 2004
The PDF option was grayed out – not available when I tried that. Don’t know what that means. But, will try again. The resulting printed drawings from the gif files were better but this has been a very frustrating problem with my project. Thanks for the suggestion.
L
larry
Jan 11, 2004
Converting to a PDF won’t improve the image quality but it may make it easier to print out the "book."

Larry Berman
SS
shirley_sidell
Jan 11, 2004
May I give you some background? I have a website www.biblicalgardens.org. One of our sections are for kids and many home schoolers have requested a new coloring book for home study. I have a ton of drawings from the US Dept.Agriculture. They are either in thumbnail size or 900×600 pixels or so. Of course they are huge files and most of the people downloading have dial up connections. There are gray ‘halos’ around some parts of the drawing making the printed image fuzzy.

I am trying to reduce the size of the file, clean up the drawings and eliminate some of the shading to make it easier to color for the kids. This is the problem. Some of the drawings will look fine and others a mess. I can post these on one of my sites if that would help.
L
larry
Jan 11, 2004
Hi Shirley,
A few questions.
Are they line drawings that the viewer would print out and color in? 900×600 pixels is not that large at 72 pixels per inch. I assume you mean that they are 8-1/2×11. If they are saved as a GIF, the amount of colors determines the files size.

You can post an example (or three) to the web and send me a link.

Larry Berman
mailto:
DM
Don_McCahill
Jan 12, 2004
PDF was probably grayed out because you were in a color mode it does not understand, like Indexed.

The beauty of PDF is that you could save the images at 300 dpi, which would make them huge (in physical size, not byte size) as a GIF, but which prints nicely.
BO
Burton_Ogden
Jan 12, 2004
Shirley,

I am trying to reduce the size of the file, clean up the drawings and eliminate some of the shading to make it easier to color for the kids. This is the problem. Some of the drawings will look fine and others a mess. I can post these on one of my sites if that would help.

It might help. One way to make web graphics small is to use Flash. You wouldn’t happen to have Macromedia’s Flash, would you?

There are numerous third party programs to convert photos into various vector graphics or drawing-like formats. Many don’t cost much. One example is:

Paint by Numbers < http://www.fasttrak.co.uk/product_info.php?cPath=9&produ cts_id=28&osCsid=3cc2113e66afe98258774f235a8ad18e>

— Burton —
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shirley_sidell
Jan 12, 2004
Thank you everyone for all of the help. LarryB had the solution. Here it is just in case anyone else tries to make a coloring book from very high quality images. The original images were tif and up to three megs.

PhotoShop, …….Image Size, 8-10 inches depending on individual drawing, resolution 72. Save for Web, *.gif and they are now printable and small enough to download fairly quickly. I have to change the names of the files so that the botianical name appears in the Title rather than the file name and then I will publish to my site. Will add the link when I get a couple done, but there are going to be about 40 in one book and 15-20 in the other. This is an educational site and the home schoolers are waiting for this stuff.

thanks again everyone, I really appreciate the help and will try to get them up tomorrow. shirley

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