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Hey everyone. I think I may have posted something regarding this last year, but I've run in to it again and thought I would revisit it and see if anyone might be able to help now. I am a screen printer and this time of year brings a lot of requests for football and basketball designs. I have a lot of clients that come in asking for designs similar to this.
The text and obvious vector stuff isn't an issue, but the football is what I'm stuck on. I have a lot of people asking us to print things like this football and other designs with basketballs like this, but I'm not sure how to get there. I'm running CorelDraw X3 and am thinking this may have something to do with taking a bitmap and doing some sort of work with making it a monotone or duotone image? Not sure. Looks like the image only uses brown and white (and the black background).
Does anyone know of any tuts or have any tips on how to achieve this type of result with a photo of a football or basketball? I seem to think I've seen other similar designs with a helmet or other types of sports equipment that look like this.
I believe it is using mainly halftones on the football, but because I don't coreldraw, I can't really help too much. But try using this tut I found via google. Hope it helps Corel DRAW: Halftone - CorelDRAW.com
Thanks for the tips. In the end, I think this has more to do with using something like photopaint to do some masking and isolate some of the colors with the color mask tool. In the end, I ran out of time on this project so I had to figure out a work around and make something happen. I thought I'd share although as I did this, it looks like, with some time and effort, you could get closer results.
My work around was to buy a stock photo of a football, mainly the laces area. Then I ended up pulling it in to PhotoPaint. I did some color masking so that it masked off all of the black in the image leaving the laces and highlights of the texture of the ball. I deleted all of the black. Then I did a "paint on mask" and turned the mask I made totally black and copied and pasted it in to Draw. From there, I converted it to a black and white, line art bitmap and traced it. Then I took that vector and colored it white. I had to do some additional work to add to the edges of the image, but long story short, I powerclipped it in to the Texas and then used that as part of my design. The schools main color is blue, but my example here is orange.
Again, this was just my workaround. Hope it helps someone. But if you have info or find a tutorial on how to achieve the original effect we were looking for, please post it.
Thanks for the kind words. I will tell you this. I learned a lot about how PhotoPaint works well together with CorelDraw from Tom over at Advanced Artist, or I guess now it's Advanced T-shirts. That guy's tutorials are awesome. I think he's a member here on the boards. In fact, the macros he recommends like his Color Selector and the oberon color replacer... They are part of my everyday use now. Couldn't live without them. If I could afford it, I'd probably buy his other plugins and stuff. He definitely helps make things more efficient for your daily work in CorelDraw. Now he just needs to make a plugin to give us this effect from a photo. I'd make a way to buy that one.
Hopefully someone will be able to help us out with some information on achieving the original effect.
Thats a perfect index job. That would work the best for getting the football to look like that. Not sure if you can do index seps in Corel so cant help there.
Thats a perfect index job. That would work the best for getting the football to look like that. Not sure if you can do index seps in Corel so cant help there.
Aaaaah, index seps. Just found this in another forum regarding index seps in PhotoPaint.
I tried this guy's directions and got close, but couldn't quite get it to work when I got to saving the channels in steps 6 and 7. Here are his directions extracted from that thread...
"It can be done, and how easy it is will depend on how familiar you are with index separations and your experience with PhotoPaint, ;this is what you have to do:
1-Open your image in Photopaint
2-Create a new empty palette
3-Using the eyedropper tool add all the colors that you want in your separation from the image to the palette, you will have to click on each color, double-click the color swatch on the toolbar and click "add to palette" and OK.
4-Go to Image>Convert to Paletted... and ewhere it says "palette" select "custom" and open the palette that contains the colors in your image.
5-Select a difussion dither algorithm like "Jarvis", "Stucki" or "Floyd Steinberg" (I prefer Jarvis), and click OK
6-Use Color Mask... to select a color in your separation, Mask mode should be Normal, Sampled Color, tolerance 0, Smooth 0
7-Save selection as channel, repeat steps 6 and 7 for each color.
8-Copy the first channel and paste in Draw, turn it to Black and White and give it a Pantone OUTLINE color that matches the color area in the image, this will turn the black area to the selected color, and select the FILL color as No COLOR.
9-Bring the next Channel and do the same, filling the black area with the corresponding color in your image, do the same for the rest of the colors.
10-Add your vector elements and make sure that the color you use match the color in your index separation.
11-Print"
Maybe this will help. If you get this to work, please post any tips or how you get it to work.... Getting closer...
OK, well, I actually went over to the Corel forum and emailed the guy that posted the steps I referenced above. Haven't heard back yet BUT, in the meantime, I think I figured something that may help us here. I just went back to Tom's site, Advanced Artist, and looked over an old tutorial that I watched a long time ago when it originally was released. It's him taking a JPG that has a logo that looks like spot colors, and he color separates it.
Well, I took the football photo that I used originally and tried this, extracting the brown just like he does with this logo, and it worked! Then I extracted the white... Worked again! OK, it's not perfect and takes some effort and attention to detail, but it's definitely an option. Here's the rough version I just did. I didn't pay much attention to detail and sort of zipped through it so don't look too close, but you get the idea.
This was set up as brown, white over a black background.
Well, this may not be the best way to do this, but it is A way to do this I suppose. If anyone has a better way, definitely post it.
That image is a football from Great Dane Graphics, which means it is a bitmap. To screen print it would need to be 4-color-process, or you could outsource to a digital printer.
That image is a football from Great Dane Graphics, which means it is a bitmap. To screen print it would need to be 4-color-process, or you could outsource to a digital printer.
It could be printed without 4 color process. Tom's tutorial (one of them) shows how to do this. It can't always be done, but with masking it could be possible.
Great post again, Mark. Not too many folks figure something out, then post how they did it. Way to go! It just keeps getting better.
Football Graphic Help??? 
Re: Football Graphic Help??? 
