Digitizing profiles of people from photos

This is always a difficult area in terms of digitizing and depends a lot upon the look you are trying to get, your expectations and the time/expense involved.

Many of the digitizing programs these days offer a straight automatic creation from a photograph, so can be incredibly easy to produce. However, the results are not ideal for most uses.

Basically thread, by definition, does not do shading very well unless it is over a large area. So with this automatic conversion you will find it can be very clever, but only looks satisfactory if embroidered very large and viewed from a distance. A bit like those pictures that are made up of thousands of other pictures, if you see what I mean. Furthermore, to create the shades and colors there will be lots of multiple layer embroidery. The end result is that the stitch count will be HUGE!

Should you need smaller renderings, then you need to revert to a 'posterized' style, with just one or a few colors; the most obvious example being the T shirt design of Che Guevara.

With this you can get a much better likeness for smaller designs and limit yourself to one color. Unfortunately, you need a good, recognizable image to start with, otherwise is there is little chance of it looking good in embroidery!

I agree with aardvark7 and also point out that not only will the stitchcounts be extremely high (5 inch tall by 4 inch wide could have over 60.000 stitches) but also your color changes could exceed the limit on your machine! Even if you tell the computer to only use 8 colors you could end up with over 100 color changes. Will the result look good, YES, but the time used in sewing the things will eat up any hope of profit as far as I am concerned!

We have a collection of old masters' paintings done in this style... the trimming on the machines due to all the color changes forced us to turn off the trimmers... but the time we gained on the machine we more than made up for in trimming all we could by hand. not fun. And our largest was only about 8 inches wide...several we had to split into two designs so the machine could handle the colors.

The Che Guevara... or as we call it the Andy Warhol style (guess our age difference,lol!) is a different look, yes, but OH so much easier to make a profit on.

Where you mention that you have seen some good renditions and many poor ones is actually not so much to do with the limitations of embroidery (although a major factor), but rather the nature of facial recognition.

There is some extremely complex processes of the brain going on and it is why we can see 'a face' with no more than a circle and 3 dots. Not only is it complex, but it is extremely accurate, surprisingly, which allows us to recognize someone from 100 yards away. If you figure out how proprtionately small the distances involved for our brain to compare head shape and position of nose, for example, you'll get an idea!!

If you talk to an experienced cartoonist they will likely be able to explain why some subjects are easy to caricature, whereas others are almost impossible.

Put such factors together with the added difficulty of embroidery and it will always be hit and miss whether the result can be recognized