RHFtech Help Desk (and more)

I am designing a website for a store, The Optical Shop of Westport (CT), that sells beautiful eyeglasses, sunglasses, sports eyewear and fashion accessories. Their logo was designed 15 years ago and only exists in paper form on their stationery and business cards. We need the logo for the website. The printed form of the logo has the store’s name running through it, as can be seen below. I had to convert the logo to digital form and remove the shop’s name. The process was:

1. Scan the stationery to create a raster image.
2. Erase the text that bled into the logo and clean up stray pixels.
3. Convert the raster image into a vector image that could be manipulated so that the jagged edges created by the scan could be smoothed into lines. Raster images are a set of pixels. Vector images are small programs, mathematical equations, which describe an image’s shapes. Vector images scale well. Raster images do not.
4. Export the vector image back to a raster image.
5. Clean up imperfections in the raster image and fill in the letters’ outlines.
6. Create four sizes of the black raster image.
7. Color the logo, trying to match the screen color to the stationery’s, and create four sizes of the colored logo.

I was unfamiliar with converting raster to vector images. I asked several friends for advice. I have a copy of Adobe Illustrator CS2, which I thought might work (since confirmed) but I am tyro using AI and easily confused by it. I found Inkscape, a free program and more modern than my copy of Adobe Illustrator, did the job.

That was painful. I am glad I don’t deal with graphics often. What a black hole of time! Of course, most of what I do is a black hold of time as well.

Here is the finished product in black and color –

Okay, the application’s name could be better, but the application is a neat drawing and image editing tool.

It works with all modern versions of Windows (2000 to 7). RealWorld Paint.COM can use most Adobe Photoshop plug-ins. And its free.

Get your copy here.

Gmail added a new feature, Inserting images, to its Labs, a place for testing out ideas. You can now place images into your email rather than attaching them. You first need to enable this feature in your Gmail or Google for Apps mail settings..

1. Click on the Settings link in the Gmail menu, along the upper right of the web page.
2. Next click on the Labs link.
3. Scroll down close to the bottom of the web page to locate the Inserting Images feature.
4. Click on the Enable radio button.
5. Click on the Save Changes button.

You can now embed images in your emails.

A new control for images has been added to your Compose Mail toolbar.

You can click on the control to add images from your computer or from a web address (URL).