XnView Software

Hi

I'm trying out xnSketch after a long arduous search for "sketch from photo" tools; I'm an amateur painter, wanting a way to turn my photos into line drawings to use as guides for painting -- my draughtsmanship is not great and I want the training wheels. the "potrace" code used as a plugin in InkScape works pretty well, but it takes quite a bit of tweaking and I'm still searching.

xnSketch is impressive. I've just been trying it on a sample image -- nifty. however, when I try to Save the altered image I'm getting a degraded lo-res version. the original image is 768x1024, and I can zoom in (in the xnSketch app) and continue to see quite smooth lines in the rendered pencil sketch version; but the Saved image (png or jpg) is only 384x512 and useless for any painting at the original (or larger) scale.

is this a bug, or a shareware strategy? do I have to pay a fee and unlock the s/w to be able to save the high-quality image I see on the screen? I'm happy to do so, if that's what it takes.

I was thrilled at first, trying it out, but now I'm disappointed that the output is lo-res and (sadly) probably not usable for my purpose. is there hope?

I think I just answered my own question

I was using the Save item under the File menu rather than the folder icons in the main app window. Under the Save folder icon I now see there's a somewhat cryptic list of options -- MatchXXX (256, 512, 1024) and Original. If I select Original this seems to preserve the original resolution. It would be helpful, I suppose, if these options were visible when Saving from the top menubar as well, but no matter -- this is free s'ware, a gift to us all, and I'm suitably grateful now that I understand how to preserve the original resolution!

Many thanks to the author and contributors. This is faster and more intuitive than InkScape's 'Trace Bitmap' feature; the result is a bitmap rather than a set of paths, so scaling is somewhat limited (I may still use InkScape where I need to scale up), but it's so much faster that xnSketch will now be my preferred tool for this purpose.

yes right, the settings are a little hidden...