How To Make Stencils in Irfanview and MSPaint
throughout this, keep in mind that the program only lets you “undo” one past action, so you will have to redo all of it if you ever want to go back more than one step.
1. open the image in irfanview
2. if it is tiny, “image”, “resize/resample”, make it as big as you want.
3. “image”, “enhance colors”, then mess with the contrast and gamma until it starts to look more defined (the features you want to show up look darker). this is usually contrast up, gamma down, but with dark pictures (as the one in this post was)you’ll have to do both up. i have never used “brightness”.
4. “image”, “decrease color depth” to 2 colors. DO NOT USE FLOYD-STEINBERG DITHERING. It makes fuzzier images. The only time you use that dithering is if none of your features come out at all. if it looks like ass at this point, “undo” and drop to 16 colors and redo step 3.
5. sometimes you have to do images in more than one step (as i had to for this one). this is trickier. if you can make different areas of the picture visible with different contrast/gamma settings, then save them as separate files.
6. open paint and make a huge workspace (with “image”, “attributes” … it needs to be big enough to fit all of the images you made, plus 2) then “paste from” them all in there, side by side. then cut out the good parts and stick them together. for areas like the arms, you have to trace around them with the paintbrush.
7. using the freehand selecty thingy in paint, trace around the entire thing (all that you want included) and move the selected part to an empty area in your workspace and save the file as a high quality bitmap.
8. open the new file in irfanview. select a square around the stencil you made and “edit”, “crop selection”.
9. then save the file as a jpeg (it lets you choose the filetype, jpeg for internet use).
It takes awhile to get used to doing all this, but the results are pretty good for having been made with a freeware program.
