help making tokens

[hawkwind]

I have just bought a cheap PDF of card board mini's I want to turn into tokens,
I have been successful in turning them in to 50 pixel square tokens but i would like some help in making the white backgrounds transparent so only the picture appears in Fantasy grounds. I have access to Paint.net, GIMP and of course Paint but no Photoshop

[AstaSyneri]

Personally I have made a file that consists of several layers: A transparent background, a border (casino-chip-like, where I can change colors), and a mask that fits within that border. For new tokens I just dump an image in that mask and export to .png using transparency.

I use Photoshop, but I am sure this can be done in GIMP as well.

[Andraax]

I have just bought a cheap PDF of card board mini's I want to turn into tokens,
I have been successful in turning them in to 50 pixel square tokens but i would like some help in making the white backgrounds transparent so only the picture appears in Fantasy grounds. I have access to Paint.net, GIMP and of course Paint but no Photoshop

You can do it in GIMP. Drag and drop the token onto GIMP's window, use the fuzzy select tool to select the white background, and press delete. Save as PNG. If you want to send 'em to me, I'll do it for you.

[Virtuous Dweller]

I use "Token Tools". Very easy to use and it is free.

https://www.rptools.net/index.php?page=tools

[Trenloe]

Just as an FYI, as I'm sure not everyone is aware of this - selecting a token for targeting (before the new targeting system in 3.0) only works when clicking on the non transparent portion of a token.

[Griogre]

Like GIMP, Paint.NET has a "fuzzy" select tool so it doesn't matter which you use. What want to do, regardless of the paint tool, is select the white then delete it.

[Leonal]

If the background is fully white or black you can also in most cases use GIMP's color selection tool. Click select, then select by color and choose either white or black. Put the threshold to 0 and click the background before deleting.

Should you have access to PaintShop Pro (30 day trial for example) it also has a background remover brush, which gets even closer around the edges than magic wand or color selection.

[hawkwind]

thanks for your tips guys, much appreciated, I would post the resulting tokens but I suspect I would be breaking various board rules

[AstaSyneri]

thanks for your tips guys, much appreciated, I would post the resulting tokens but I suspect I would be breaking various board rules

you can show a few of them "in action", as in a session screenshot (which may well be a mock-up). I don't think anybody can fault you for that. What you definitely can't do is share the whole lot of them so others can use them without paying.

I certainly would be interested in seeing your results.

[hawkwind]

theres a challenge!

[hawkwind]

I couldn't find the tool in Paint.net which is a shame as Gimp is bit slow on my windows system any way here are the results of my experiments, please tell me to delete if this breaches board rules5193

[Trenloe]

Looks cool! :)

[gmkieran]

Nice! Definitely like the transparent backgrounds better.

Cheers!

[Griogre]

I couldn't find the tool in Paint.net
It's called Magic Wand in Paint.Net. If you have the tools bar open its in the left column 4th one down. When you have the tool selected you should see a tolerance bar. The tolerance is how close to the selected color with low percentage meaning low fuzziness (color has to be closer) and higher tolerance mean more fuzziness.

[hawkwind]

thanks that's a great help. paint.net is just do much quicker than Gimp on my Windows box.

[Nickademus]

Wait, I know that house! :P

[hawkwind]

damn it I hadn't given the plot away, Allen robots did the kidnapping!

one thing I learned making the counters in Paint.net it's too save the tokens as .png files as it doesn't work with jpegs

[hawkwind]

any idea how to do this https://dngnsndrgns.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Roll20 in paint.net or Gimp?

[Leonal]

Well, as 3D software was used in their creation, I'd guess it's a bit hard in either of those. You could use TokenTool referenced earlier in the thread for flat tokens though.

Or see the great explanation below. :D

[Trenloe]

any idea how to do this https://dngnsndrgns.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Roll20 in paint.net or Gimp?
For GIMP:

Open the .PSD in GIMP (lets call this image #1)
Enable the Layers dialog by pressing CTRL+L
Click on layer 2 to select the creature image layer. Press CTRL+C to copy just this layer.
Go to Edit -> Paste As -> New Image (Shift + Ctrl + V).
Your new image shows the creature image with background transparency (image #2). Use the "Free Select" tool (Press F) to select the edges of the pawn image and use Edit -> Fill With BG color (Ctrl + .). This will leave you with a white pawn image.
Open the new image you want to use as a pawn (image #3). Use Select -> All (Ctrl + A) to select the whole image - or use a relevant selection tool (Tools -> Selection Tools) to select what you want to use. You may want to shear the image to match the pawn background - use Tools -> Transform Tools -> Shear (Shift + S) to make the image diagonal use a Shear Magnitude Y of around -40 or something that works for you. Press CTRL+C to copy your selection.
Go back to your blank pawn image (Image #2 - step 5), use the Fuzzy Select tool (Tools - Selection Tools - Fuzzy Select (U)) and click inside the blank white image this will select the whole of the white area. Then use Edit -> Paste Into to paste your new pawn image into the selected area.
Move the pasted pawn image around within the white background to find the best match. Use the Fuzzy Select tool (U) and click outside of the white area to select the rest of the image outside of the white area and use Layers -> Crop to Selection to trim any unwanted areas outside of the white area.
Select the whole image - Select -> All (CTRL+A) and Copy (CTRL+C). Go to image #1, in the layers window (CTRL+L) click on "Layer 2" to select it and then delete it (use the delete icon (bottom right of layers window)).
In the layers window, select "Group 1" and use use Edit -> Paste As -> New Layer to add your new image to "Group 1". Move the image around (Press M to get the Move Tool) until it matches the pawn background.
Export your image as a.PNG file: File -> Export.

I'm sure there are other ways of doing this, but this one works OK...

[hawkwind]

+1 to Trenloe and for a bonus point is it possible to macro this or do some kind of command line script?

[Trenloe]

+1 to Trenloe and for a bonus point is it possible to macro this or do some kind of command line script?
Possibly, with some Script-Fu - but don't have the time to work that out at the moment, FG Con admin is taking priority. Sorry, no bonus point for me. :-o

[Mgrancey]

I don't know about coding it but you should be able to setup a macro internally.

As someone else stated you can alter the Tolerance to adjust how much it will accept deviation from the original pixels to select, I normally work with a Tolerance of about 15-25, depending on how picking the program or myself are feeling.

The other option you want to use is Feathering at 1-3 pixels. What this does is when you remove the selected white space from the image, is it alters the transparency of pixels on the edge over that distance. This removes the real hard edges that you can see on your multi-armed robot.

For those areas of black space that where with your goblin and any other tokens, just run a small but hard eraser around the edges of your image and that will clear them up.

Off the top of my head here are some quick additions to Trenloe's directions to enhance them. After I have chance to play around some more I can offer some others details and other suggestions.
* A simply addition would be to apply an bevel edge (Filters -> Decor -> Add Bevel) effect to the near final product which would help give it a bit more 3d appearance.
* Adding a shadow (Filters -> Light and Shadow -> Drop Shadow) that is white and altered to apply at an contrasting angle from the sheer would also give you the illusion of thickness.
* Adding an Emboss (Filters -> Distorts -> Emboss) would also give the creature image a bit of POP, though a bit more work with a Bump Map would also create an illusion of depth.