Tips and Known Issues

Tips

  • It's much easier to see the source intensity of your image by converting it to a grey image, either by using your host application's Greyscale function or using the companion PhotoGrey plugin. If you change the type of image to greyscale (256 colours) you also save memory, useful for very large (print resolution) files.
  • Although the Sketcher plugin provides versatile controls to adjust the density and contrast in its effects, often the quickest way to get the look you are after is not to change the plugin settings but to vary your source image using the Brightness, Contrast, Gamma correction and Histogram functions of your graphics application. By just using these functions and the Sketcher plugins default .sms effects files you have access to a lot of different images from the same source.
  • Remember to use uncompressed greyscale bitmaps for your stroke maps and paper textures.
  • When creating high resolution sketches for print, high supersampling isn't necessary; you should set Smoothing to 4 at most. But you will need to increase the scaling for each level media (stroke maps and paper). Look out for updated settings files and stroke maps from Little Ink Pot designed exclusively for print.
  • The settings file "Halftone.sms" applies the paper texture as a halftone pattern. Changing the file can produces differing halftone effects. To create your own halftone patterns, create a greyscale image with the highest value limited to 230 (light grey) instead of 255 (white).

Known Issues

Though extensively tested and evaluated to make it's use as problem free as possible, as with all but the simplest of software there are to be expected some issues with the Sketcher plugin which might mess things up a bit. These will be addressed where possible in future updates, but until then here's a list of the known problems and how to avoid them.

  • There's a bug with irregular sized media source images which causes corrupted rendering of the graphics data. This doesn't usually become apparent in use as most media images are saved in regular sizes, but when creating stroke maps and papers be sure your stroke maps and papers are horizontally sized in multiples of 4. eg. 640 pixels wide (= 160 x 4), 1280, 1600, 16 pixels wide etc.