Having a picture digitized????

[mol3000]

I have went to more than one place, to get a hat done and to get something put on a tshirt. And all places says sinces its a picture that i have to have it digitized and they can do it for $75 hour but i think i can do it on my computer myself. So what is it exactly.

[Keitho]

If it's a photograph, just have it scanned and saved onto a cd or floppy disk. There's bound to be someone you know that has a scanner.

[redwudz]

Or if you have access to a digital camera, you may be able to do it that way. The main thing is to get it on disc or your hard drive so you can work with it. You can use a graphic editing program to clean it up a little.

Then pick up some iorn-on transfer media and you can make the T shirt or hat yourself.

[kschang]

WHAT?!?!?! You can do that at Walgreens easy enough. Those yellow Kodak PictureMaker machines? They usually have a scanner attached. At worst you need to pay them about $5 to burn it onto a CD (even that's a bit much) but better than $75.

You need an inkjet to print onto Iron-on transfers. Mirror the output, confirm it's fine, print it, then iron it onto the T-shirt.

[greymalkin]

if you go the iron-on router make sure it's a shirt you are only going to wear maybe once or twice. Those iron on films start cracking and looking bad pretty quickly.

[mol3000]

No... im getting it embroiled and they said its not just putting on a computer and cleaning it up that there is more but they wont tell me what... and i dont want to just pay them 80 for something i can easily do myself

[jimmalenko]

... and i dont want to just pay them 80 for something i can easily do myself

... with the help of free advice from a forum on the internet

[rallynavvie]

No... im getting it embroiled and they said its not just putting on a computer and cleaning it up that there is more but they wont tell me what... and i dont want to just pay them 80 for something i can easily do myself

Embroidered? If so then they're talking about getting it color-seperated and ready for computerized embroidery. This is a lot more involved than just scanning the picture. You have to decide how many colors of thread you're going to use for the embroidery and then create vector art from outlines for each of those colors. It's actually not too tough if you just want to trace it in Illustrator or Freehand. If it's already line art you could use something like Streamline to automate the process but that can be a tough app to master. I usually use Illustrator for press-prep like that.

However many places that do specialized embroidery have programs that know what colors of thread there are to work with and can pick out a scanned photo in the data required for the machines. I've only ever done line art I created myself for embroidery projects like hats and jackets though.

[greymalkin]

phew yeah thats a horse of a different color...$80 isn't sounding too bad all of a sudden