What is a good Photo Editor?

[booboo60]

What is a good Photo Editor for decals? Like Photo shop ? Pro? OR maybe Coral Paint? or ? Thanks

[Brett Barrow]

You're probably better off with a vector-based drawing program like Illustrator or Corel Draw. I've played around with a freeware program called Inkscape to get a feel for vector drawing.

http://www.inkscape.org/en/

I'm sure the guys that actually draw decals will weigh in on the subject.

[ScaleDale]

What exactly do you want to do? Create your own graphics from nothing or convert existing images to decals? The software and skill demands are different for each.

Dale

[booboo60]

a little of both, I have a decal of a rod shop car, but its 1/16 scale, and I wanna size it down to 1/24, or 1/25, also copy some and print, or I have a set of grumpy toy Camaro, and they got dirty, and look rough, wanna clean them up, cover a cpl cracks in them etc,,thanks guys

[booboo60]

Ok. Like corl draw. There are like 10 different kinds. Lol. ?

[John Pol]

I have Coral Photo shop 15 paid like 80 bucks for it off ebay it will do what you want to do

[Harry P.]

I have Coral Photo shop 15 paid like 80 bucks for it off ebay it will do what you want to do

There's no such thing as Corel Photoshop. Photoshop is made by Adobe.

[Baugher Garage]

It's hard to beat Adobe Photoshop. You can download a free trial of it here, although I'm not sure what the trial's restrictions are. If it's full-featured and just limited on how long you can try it, then grab it and have fun!

https://creative.adobe.com/products/photoshop

[ScaleDale]

a little of both, I have a decal of a rod shop car, but its 1/16 scale, and I wanna size it down to 1/24, or 1/25, also copy some and print, or I have a set of grumpy toy Camaro, and they got dirty, and look rough, wanna clean them up, cover a cpl cracks in them etc,,thanks guys

First you need a scanner or printer/scanner capable of 600 to 1200 dpi in what they call optical resolution. That means it's not invented by software, but reproduced by the scanner itself. That will give you a sharp enough image that any loss of detail from your editing won't show when you scale it down to decal size. I haven't worked with any Corel products in ages, so I don't really know what they have to offer these days. You can't beat PhotoShop, but PhotoShop Elements comes close and won't break your budget unless your budget is "free". Download the trial and see if it agrees with you.

This is how I size my decals: I scan the final assembly page from the instructions and measure the wheelbase of the actual model at the same resolution setting I used or will use for the decal scan. Then I scale the scan in PhotoShop (Elements will do this) with the ruler visible until it matches the model. That gives me something to play with that is identical to the model. After I clean up my decal image I copy/paste it into the model scan where it shows as a layer over the model. There are tricks to make the background of the decal go away so all you have is the decal image floating over the model. Then you can select the decal and scale it up or down by dragging handles without changing the size of the car. Make it the size you want and copy/paste it to a new document and save it as your decal. Do this over and over until you have a bunch of decals and put them on one page for printing. Remember you can't print white.

Sounds like gobble gook, I bet. I have a background in Graphic Design with formal training.

I did most of these decals:

Dale

[Brett Barrow]

Since you already have the art, you can use a photo editor like Photoshop (there's a similar freeware program called GIMP that works well and can be downloaded here: http://www.gimp.org/). You can make decals smaller by scanning and resizing, but if you enlarge them, you'll lose resolution, and that's where a vector drawing program would come in handy, since they don't lose resolution by being resized.

Really a combination of both types of software (photo editing and vector drawing) is ideal for decal art because you can use the photo editor to straighten and remove distortion from perspective then trace over the photo in the vector program. Here's an example of airplane decals I'm currently working on. That's how I did the name, I straightened the photo and traced it in Inkscape. I also increased the contrast so I could more clearly see the color difference in the red drop shadow. I still have to do the cartoon duck and it's giving me some problems, I think I might be better off drawing it on paper and scanning it rather than do it all on the computer. I'm not a graphic designer nor do I have any formal training in it.

Edited February 19, 2014 by Brett Barrow