Recoloring the wrong way (in raster)

[cafe]

If you want to try the vector route, sjsquirrel made a tutorial about recoloring scissorsandplanes's models with inkscape.

[wireandpaper]

Thank you Carlos for the link:
I know, I know "La Fatalité"
Resistance is futile.

[wireandpaper]

I just recently finish a DHC-2 from Bruno in UN markings and I had a spare one in white. This model is a hand drafted copy of the Christmas Beaver by Jim Gausman of Design Group Alpha without Santa's Colors. But "la fatalite", it has been reverted to arctic / antarctic red.
It is unmarked but at least the British and the Argentinian had them in red.
Antarctic beavers also come in yellow, orange, and with high visibility markings usually in orange or red.
So I used a marker, and for those areas difficult to reach water colors and a very fine brush. The ink is translucid and also the water colors.
This is the way I started my coloring / recolors of paper planes long, long time ago before electronic / digital media.
Included are some vehicles of the Japanese Antarctic Expedition.

[lfuente]

Originally Posted by wireandpaper

First do a the screen capture of the model you want to recreate and copy it into MS Powerpoint. Do the biggest size it fits in the screen.
I will use the, by now familiar, Bruno's DC-5 that Pacific Winds and Café have done wonderfully in vector.
1 Get the screen shot using the Print Screen command into Powerpoint
2 Clean in Paint (and recolor the ruder)
3 Return to powerpoint and add the insignia and lettering
4 Finally resize to your desire scale. The original scale bar is 10 cm. In my case I always rescale to 1/400 or a scale bar of 7.5cm

Glad to see this thread Pablo, I didn't think there'd be any interest. Allow me to add a couple of things I learned:

1) On my version of Adobe Reader 9 you're not limited to your screen size for screen captures - even if you just have 1/4 of the PDF window visible, go to Tools/Select&Zoom/SnapshotTool and draw a selection box randomly where you can see it. Then go to the toolbar box where you see the display size in percent, and change that to your desired percentage (I usually do 200%). Finally, go to Edit/SelectAll (which will automatically select the whole page, even the offscreen parts) then Edit/Copy to do a screen capture, which you can then paste into MS Paint to edit or save, or paste directly to Powerpoint. Note that the file size can increase very quickly if you choose enlargement ratios like 400% or 800%, sometimes it's not worthwhile to go for super high resolution.

2) I discovered this useful trick a few days ago - up to that point I'd always imported black and white PNG (or GIF or JPG) files directly into Powerpoint, and was limited by the quality of the panel lines in the file. Then I accidentally pasted a picture copied from Paint, and noticed the panel line color and thickness were different. After experimenting some more I found that the dominant panel line color depends on the fill color used in the white areas, with the best results from using a neutral gray fill (R128,G128,B128). So the procedure I adopted was fill selected white areas in the black and white picture with neutral gray in Paint (ignoring the off color pixels next the panel lines), copy the picture, paste into Powerpoint then set the neutral gray to transparent.

Attached are 2 screen captures from my currently pending Ford Cortina upload that shows the difference between imported and pasted picture quality. This is from a full page original graphic captured at 200% enlargement then downscaled to 1/72, so your results may be different - but go try it yourself!

[tigertony100]

Everyday we learn something new, about half a year I was experimenting with something like that on raster files. I'll take your approach a chance and let's see what is the result. Tony.

[Vinalssergio155]

You do know that of this, thank you all for sharing your knowledge. When entering the forum my goal was to improve my constructions to advance. Now every day I have more desire to learn this about color changes, there are infinite versions, although Bruno did an impressive amount plus all the overcoats of so many others there are thousands of versions still out there. If I can learn this simply by making versions of the planes that my country uses I would be busy until the rest of my life.

[Sygrod]

I have a different approach.
What I like to do is maximize a page, so that there will be as little waste as possible.
I use these services:
https://pdftojpg.me/
PDF to JPG Online Converter - Convert PDF to Image formats
Convert to 600 or 900 dpi jpg. that keeps quality high.
Then I just load into my paint program (Paintshop Pro 2018 in my case) and do what I want with it, saving in PSP format so that no detail is lost.

[wireandpaper]

Thank very much Lorenzo, Tony, Sergio, and Sygrod:

In Mexico we say: many way to kill a roach.
I have to try Lorenzo's and Sygod's methods one of these days. I used to use a service to convert a file to B&W but I forgot where since I use other means now.

By the way this is the DHC-2 Beaver that I recolored for Sergio (and pay the respective fee to Bruno to be able to share) although this is in 1/400.
Sergio's construction in 1/100 you may find it here:

DHC-2 Beaver, Argentine Air Force, S&P design, repainted by Wireandpaper

Happy modeling