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Need Help Mimicking Digital RGB LED Display
I need to simulate an LED display and I’m having trouble figuring out how to do a photographic version of it. I’ve already done one that just displays one color text.
The display has 8mm round LED’s that are spaced 16mm to center apart (or basically 8 mm in between). I would just do a clipping mask in FreeHand or Illustrator, but it takes way to much memory in Illustrator and FreeHand refuses to do it at all. So it looks like I’ll have to use Photoshop. I can do basic photo editing in Photoshop, but something like this is beyond my knowledge. The size is 160 LED’s horizontally and 64 LED’s vertically.
Any ideas or tips on how to make uniformly spaced circles for a clipping mask in Photoshop? Or a better way to mimic this type of display? Any help is greatly appreciated. I have to put a link to the image on Flickr of the sign with the LED lettering because I can’t attach a picture here. http://www.flickr.com/photos/21359827@N08/3470392039/
The LED supplier we are using is here: http://www.esignled.com/
The display model is E16 -
5 Replies
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if i have understood
create a vector array in illy and place in to PS.
chris
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Thanks Chris.
I did try making the circles in FreeHand and then bring them into Illustrator. That didn’t pan out to well. It really bogged my machine down and I have 2 1/2 Gigs of RAM! My only problem making them directly in Illustrator is that I don’t know how to duplicate the first circle and then move it a certain distance for a specified number of times. I can easily do it in FreeHand. I’m sure there’s probably a way to do that in Illustrator, but I just don’t know how. Looks like my next challenge is to figure out how to do that in Illy. I’ll let you know how it turns out though.
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do you just want a grid of circles
chris
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My problem isn’t the circles, but getting them into a program where I can use them. Basically I think that might be the way to go. I’m not really sure how accurate it will look when done. I might be wasting my time trying to do it this way. I was thinking that all though punching the image out of all the LED’s would be more physically accurate, I’m not sure if it will actually mimic the digital display correctly though. I don’t know if doing some basic Moire pattern might actually look better or not. It’s hard to tell because the website for the LED manufacturer doesn’t have very good photos posted. I don’t have a real one nearby to even look at. So it’s hard for me to gauge (is it gage in the UK?) how to go about this one. I did make some circles in Illy and made an eps. I tried bringing them into Photoshop and it was taking forever to raster the artwork. I think my next try will be to do the same thing, but drop the circles down to 1/2" = 1′-0" scale so it won’t take up so much memory. I really need to try and figure out a good method for this because it seems like these LED displays are becoming the next craze in signs over here. We’ve started getting more and more requests for them, so I need to figure out the best method to make them look as close to the real product as I can. Thanks again for the help.
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Well I think that might have worked! It was much easier to do it in scale and then bring it into photoshop. I just put the pattern on top of the image and then dropped the opacity down to about 40%. There might be a better way after bring both layers in. Not really sure. Let me know if that looks ok or not, or if you have any other suggestions. Thanks again for the help Chris. It’s greatly appreciated.
Simon
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