Image Manipulation

The purpose of this post is to explain how to convert a photo or other image into a positive image, an important first step in the screen printing process.

To start with I’m going to use the image editor “Gimp”. It can be downloaded for free and is a very effective photo image editor. Up to now I have been using Photoshop 7, but it is old so may not be available to everyone.

It is very important to choose/make images with as plain a background as you can get. A background with all one color is best, if at all possible. This makes editing out the background noise a lot easier.

First open Gimp and import the image that you want to work on. I save the image to a new name, that way I can use the original later elsewhere if needed. Go up to the menubar and select image, then in the dropdown menu select “Mode”. In this menu select grayscale. Grayscale will remove the color information and make it easier to convert your file to a burnable image.

Then go back to the menubar and select Filters, in the dropdown menu. Click on Artistic and go over to Photocopy and choose it. A box will pop up that will give you a preview and four adjustments, this window will allow you to drag the preview to a section of the image so you can see what you are doing. Then you can play with the four adjustments till you get the image that you like. The ones I adjust most often are ‘Mask radius’, ‘Percent black’ and ‘Percent white’. Once I’m happy with the image I’ll click OK and then save the image.

Sometimes I’ll go to “Colors” on the Menubar and select Brightness-Contrast in the dropdown and make further adjustments as I see fit. If somewhere in the process I don’t like what I see I’ll go to edit and click on undo till I get back to a point where I’m happy and start again.

This is a very simple tutorial and it assumes you know something about editing images in an editor.

The next post will cover printing the image with an ink jet printer.


Cya, Al

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