Stitchboard Admin message #2
Re: Written pattern & Graphghan
February 6, 2017 at 5:06:11 AM  (in response to hollybby18 message #1)
 
Holly,

Welcome! 

I've alerted Terry (Support) to your question.  (He's not a crocheter, so he doesn't monitor this part of the Community.)

Offhand, I'm guessing that though you can't see them, the spots may actually be in your original.  The software sees what's actually there, much more than the human eye, so if that's the case, it's not so much an error as it is something in your original image that you can't see.

However, I'm no expert on image processing, so I've let Terry know about your post. 

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BetwixtTheStitch message #3
Written pattern & Graphghan
February 6, 2017 at 8:34:00 AM  (in response to hollybby18 message #1)
 
Hi there hollybby18,

I've had the same problem with those stray pixels of color, we can't see them with our naked eye, but the program does pick them up.

I put my image into editing software (I use GIMP), and magnify it so I can clean them up. Basically just make them the same color as the one next to them.

Another option is to just leave it in the graph, but do your stitch in the appropriate color,

If you're working from a word chart, it helps to at least have the graph as well, so you can pull it up and look at it to determine if it's the right color.

I started out working from the word charts, but in time I realized that it's actually easier to work from the graph.

Hope this helps some.

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Stitchboard Support message #4
Written pattern & Graphghan
February 6, 2017 at 11:31:30 PM  (in response to hollybby18 message #1)
 
Hi, Holly.

Here are a few possible causes of this:

1. Your image is in the .jpg format.  This image format, unless saved without compression, commonly has stray pixels, often in subtle off-colors.

2. You're starting with a large image and the freePatternWizard is reducing it to a smaller size that you specify.  Reducing images can often introduce unwanted pixels or colors.

3. Your image may actually include pixels of other colors that are not apparent unless you enlarge it a lot.  I recently received a black and white image from a user and she was asking why the program gave her a bunch of colors in addition to shades of gray.  I magnified the image 1200 times and there were hundreds and hundreds of pixels that were yellow, red, green, blue, and various other colors.  The freePatternWizard sees these colors and  considers them part of the image so it tries to include these in the final image.

There are other possible causes of stray colors but these are some of the more common ones.

Here are a few potential things you can do to deal with the issue:

Try making adjustments in Section 8:

• "Stray pixel cleanup" in section 8 can sometimes help.  Set this to "light", "medium", or "heavy" to see if it helps.
• Try turning on the "Antialias" feature
• Turn up the brightness a little
• Turn down the contrast a bit
• Set the "Smoothness" setting toward the "Smoother"
• Turn up the "Color Sensitivity"
• Some combination of the above

The only real solution is to start with an uncompressed .gif or .png image that has the same number of pixels wide as you want stitches across.

This almost always creates a perfect, clean chart.

Hope this helps.

Terry

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