User blog:JoshuaJSlone/Creating a giant Minimo

I have been scanning a lot of stuff lately, and sometimes see something worth taking a break and trying to separate. It helps a lot if it's something with clear borders which help separate it from the surrounding image. In this case it was a Minimo on the disc for Minimoni Shakatto Tambourine! Da Pyon!. I thought some people might be interested in the process.

As will be the case for most of the images shown here, the original is much larger. Anyway, the next thing I did was straighten it out. I first cropped the disc image since when dealing with such a big scan the program likes to yell at me for running low on memory and such, so I did so--but left the PlayStation logo so I could align the Straighten tool along one of its edges. Get the logo straight, and Minimo comes with it.

The next step was using what at least in PaintShop Pro is called the Magic Wand Tool, so you can click on an area and select the areas of similar color surrounding it--with a user-adjustable amount of tolerance. So I did this with the outline of the Minimo, and had to remember to hold down Shift so I could add in disconnected areas (like the eyes) without losing the original. Once all selected I copied and pasted it into its own image, and ended up with a transparent outline like this.

I next told it to decrease color depth to just two colors, to make the outline very clear-cut. Soft edges are often a Good Thing, but it makes filling in colors trickier. Decreasing to plain black and white like this makes the edges very noticeable if you're looking at it at full size--but the good thing about working on something in a much larger size than you expect it to be viewed is that that's not going to matter much. Here is a small portion of what it looks like--if you view the image here at full size you'll probably be able to see the harsh edges.

That done, it was time to fill in with colors to get a non-outline version. Where to get the colors? I first thought of using the existing small Minimo image we had around here, but I remembered that earlier in my scanning there was a sticker sheet with some smaller Minimos that might be a better source.

So I used the Dropper tool to pick a bit of the light pink (not overly worrying about there being slight variance in where specifically I clicked), and used the Flood Fill tool to fill in the appropriate area. And so on for the other colors. In many cases something like this would not work out well, but the Minimo is a very simple design without any noticeable shading, so large flat areas of the same color is fine.

End result, a Minimo over 2000 pixels tall that might not be perfect, but is probably the best you can find online. And bonus, since it's actually a very simple image with so few colors, even at giant size it's still a mini file.

For comparison, here is the one we had before.

I do notice now there is a pretty big difference in one of the ears--a big line was just plain left out of the disc art that's found in the other two. But oh well, if no other better source presents itself I can probably do a half decent job of splicing it in from a second-best source like that sticker.