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Making your embroidery hobby even easier!

Pattern Maker™ for Cross-Stitch by Hobbyware

Image Importing

The Importing feature of Pattern Maker allows you to create a starting point for a design from a graphics file. This graphics file can be one created by scanning a photograph with your scanner or a clipart file that you already have.

What the Importing feature does:

• It creates a new pattern based upon the selected image.
• It analyzes the colors of the image and determines a floss palette.
• It uses Full stitches to represent the image. Each stitch position of the pattern will have a Full stitch representing one or more pixels of the original image.
• As an option, it can insert the image into the pattern without conversion so that you can manually import by tracing/drawing over it.
• It can open/recognize the following graphics file formats:

BMP
PCX
GIF
TIFF
WMF
JPEG
...plus a few other less common types

What the Importing feature does not do:

• It does not create a ready-to-stitch pattern. Depending upon the image, you will need to edit the pattern to get a finished result.
• It does not create a pattern in which the colors are an exact match with the colors of the image. The number of colors available in the various floss families are simply to limited to achieve an exact match. As a result, some images will look better than others after importing. Also, images that contain colors which are especially sensitive to matching, such as facial tones, are especially hard to convert.
• It does not maintain all of the detail in the image. The amount of detail in the imported design will typically be much less than in the original image. For example, an image created using a scanner might have a resolution of 600DPI (dots per inch). Where as, a pattern setup for 22 stitches per inch will effectively be equivalent to 22DPI. Note, however, that you can offset this difference by creating a pattern that is larger in finished size than the original image. Of course, there is a limit to that approach since the pattern size must be small enough that it can be stitched in one's lifetime.
• It does not automatically insert back stitches to the pattern. You will need to add them manually after importing.

If you have any additional questions, please contact our sales department