Windows app to fill areas of photo in black for PCB copying?

[Chris Wilson]

 Basically I am looking for the best / easiest way to take a photo of the copper tracks side of a single sided printed circuit board and fill in the tracks in solid black so the new image can be printed on clear acetate sheet to make a copy board through photo resist coated PCB and etching. Some boards will have copper coloured tracks, some like this example with tinning on the copper so it looks silver. I have tried filling in with a digital paintbrush in Paint, but it's inaccurate and very tedious. Would some sort of PC Tablet with a stylus be better, or is there an app to flood selected areas in black? Thanks

[CJay]

 Basically I am looking for the best / easiest way to take a photo of the copper tracks side of a single sided printed circuit board and fill in the tracks in solid black so the new image can be printed on clear acetate sheet to make a copy board through photo resist coated PCB and etching. Some boards will have copper coloured tracks, some like this example with tinning on the copper so it looks silver. I have tried filling in with a digital paintbrush in Paint, but it's inaccurate and very tedious. Would some sort of PC Tablet with a stylus be better, or is there an app to flood selected areas in black? Thanks

Illuminate it from behind, the component side, and it will improve the contrast a lot, if you can colour the board with a sharpie that will also make your life easier.

Also, a scanner will help you get the board square without lens aberration or camera alignment problems.

[ju1ce]

I agree that the image could be better in terms of lighting, but I think I got a pretty good result by using an implementation of the Sobel-Feldman edge detection filter (http://pinetools.com/image-edge-detection) and then reducing brightness and contrast in paint.net.

[Rerouter]

Again, even lighting would help, you can abuse "picasa" using the "neon" effect for edge highlighting, followed by Pencil Scket to convert it to black and white to get similar effects.

[nali]

For a board as simple as this, it'd probably be as quick if not quicker to just re-create it. If you have a draw / paint package that supports layers then create an an outline and the edge connector based on measurements, manipulate the image to fit, then just draw the pads / tracks using the image on a background layer as a guide.

Personally I'd use OpenOffice Draw - create a pad with a black circle & white circle for the hole, copy/paste as required, then either freehand draw the lines or use lines / curves for the tracks. That's assuming you want a facsimile of the original and don't want to use a PCB package to make something electrically equivalent but visually different.

[frozenfrogz]

If you want to digitize PCBs on a regular basis I recommend to use a flatbed scanner.
The better the image (especially homogeneous lighting), the easier the job.

Since it is a very rainy day and I feel like doing something nice:

You are welcome.

Edit: You of course need to scale it accordingly, I however have already adjusted for lens distortion as much as possible.
For pixel graphics you could use the Gimp. It has a lot of nice features especially regarding edge selection and the likes.
I would recommend doing tracing in a vector based format such as .svg. Inkscape is the way to go.

[Yansi]

IrfanView

Small, free but powerful tool. It is a must have.

[ar__systems]

you can use photoshop, but as was already pointed out, the board is so simple you can recreate it in CAD tool faster than messing around in photoeditor.

[DigitalDeath]

That's pretty easy to do tracing in a cad that can do img import.

[DigitalDeath]

Here's in DXF and PDF

[DigitalDeath]

First you open your cad and make a rectangle of the given dimensions. Then you export that rectangle to an img file. You open the picture of the board in photoshop and place the exported rectangle image file on a second layer and set it to 50% opacity so you can see thru it. Then select the layer that contains the board picture and use the distort and warp transforms to make it match the edges of the rectangle on the second layer. Once they match delete the second layer save the board image file and then import it into the cad under the original rectangle you made before and simply trace it using circles for the round pads and holes and polylines for the traces. Once done tracing select all polylines and apply smoothing to make them nicely curved. Took me about 5 minutes to do this one to show you using VectorWorks.

[Chris Wilson]

Sorry not to have got back, one of my dogs became sick, needed 24 hour care, but subsequently it became terminal and he had to be put to sleep.

I really appreciate all the help, sadly I did not have the required software nor experience to do this conversion myself, but frozenfrogz very kindly did me some mirror .pdf images for a few beers and hopefully I can now recreate my boards. I have had issues with some photo resist board that's been in a drawer for over a year, so have ordered new PCB and will try again, the help here has been exceptionally generous, thank you all.

[mojo3120]

If you want to digitize PCBs on a regular basis I recommend to use a flatbed scanner.

Yes, only way to go. They're all over craigslist for <$10.

I reverse engineered a 4 layer pcb with a flatbed scanner and photoshop. Used a power sander to expose each layer, scanning each one throughout the process. Then I put them all into photoshop at 50% transparency, mirrored the bottom layers and rebuilt the layer stack up.

To answer your question....the trick is to convert the copper layers to black and white, max out the contrast and play with brightness levels. You can see in attached image where I used the paint bucket tool to auto fill the traces (instead of solid black, I used different colors to identify each trace).