Monday, October 12, 2015

Green Colorized Mold SEM Image


Click HERE to vote for my design! (username = StargazunDesigns, picture is the one below, right)


I've been eyeing Spoonflower.com for a while now waiting to figure out what I want to create for my first fabric.  A couple of days ago I noticed that the weekly contest for this week was Microorganisms.  My husband just started his own SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) rental business so I figured this was a sign to get myself in gear and try to lay out my first fabric.  After going through a number of my husbands pictures I decided on trying to use this image he took with his new microscope as my inspiration.  We've gotten images of a number of different types of mold but I thought this one was particularly interesting (and I also think the spores look like little coffee beans).  The images are all taken in greyscale and I added in additional color with Photoshop.  To make this image into a step an repeat I cut out individual spores in Photoshop, created vector images out of each in Illustrator and kept adding and arranging them until I had a pattern.  I found that I felt like my Illustrator images were coming out as desired but when I uploaded the files to Spoonflower I had trouble getting the colors/design to look the same.  In my first attempt, the "mold beans" somehow became neon green when uploaded to Spoonflower. I also felt like a lot of the detail in the original image was lost too. I created a TIF as my first file format so the conversion from a vector image should have already happened before it was uploaded. (Left = TIF, Right = After Upload)


I had tried a number of different exports (formats and settings) and eventually found that the least amount of change happened when I darkened the image a bit (which I think is really what helped it) and exported as a jpg file. Its still not as good as my original but much better.  (Left = JPG, Right = After Upload)