EQ6 - Scanning Fabrics Part 3

Large Prints:
My goal over the next few weeks is to scan all my lines of Jo Morton fabrics and prepare swatches to load into EQ6's 'My Fabric Library.' For the vast majority of these fabrics, I will be able to do small pattern crops that have small file sizes and that will tile nicely in EQ6. However, there are a few fabrics that will pose a challenge and three of them are the main fabrics in the Stafford County line. The pattern repeat on these fabrics is huge; 12.5" length-wise and 21" width-wise. I cannot possible include the whole repeat and my only option will be to crop to a portion of the pattern.

I sat down the other day and played with a few ideas in Paint Shop Pro. This little tutorial will show you the solution I settled on. I will mention the steps I took; unfortunately, for times sake, I will not be explaining how to perform these steps.

In image #1 above, you can see the portion of the pattern I selected. The size of this crop is 500 x 500 pixels and the resulting .jpeg was 160 KB. I checked with EQ and an occasional file size this large is acceptable. You will notice in image #1 that portions of the pattern appear along the edges of the crop and for most large patterns this will likely be unavoidable. As a result, when you upload the swatch into EQ6, you will not get a smooth seamless tile and instead you will have a series of repeating boxes. The white arrows in image #2 point to the edges of one of these repeating boxes. With a dark fabric such as this, you could live with the result and you would only notice the repeating when you zoom in close. However, with light and medium fabrics, it will be more noticeable.

The solution to this problem can be seen in the image to the left. What I have done here is to remove the pattern that appears along the edges of the fabric swatch. I accomplished this by using the 'Clone Tool' in Paint Shop Pro. With this tool, I am actually taking a snap shot in the plain area of the swatch and using it to 'paint over' the pattern. The final result is a swatch with plain fabric along all the edges. I could upload this now into EQ6 once I turned it into a .jpeg and those repeating boxes would be gone.

I decided, however, to 'play' a little bit more with my swatch and fill in some of those large blank areas and you can see the result in image #1 above. I accomplished this by duplicating my original swatch a number of times and cropping out small areas of the pattern which I then 'tidied up', copied, and pasted into my new swatch. When I was satisfied with the result, I converted it to a .jpeg (150 KB) and loaded it into EQ6. Image #2 shows this reworked swatch used in a quilt border. You will notice the repeating boxes are gone.

Whether or not you want to go through these extra steps is a personal choice. You can see in the image below that when the quilt is on the worktable in the default view those repeating boxes really aren't going to be an issue. However, when you do have a photo editing program like Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop Elements, you certainly have the tools to solve the problem should you want to.