Wall stickers for printing the stroke around the picture

[Quasia]

I need to design stickers for the company, their Inn suppliers send the files ready for printing and cutting. In printable files, bitmap items have an outline as if they were drawn from the stretched edge of the image. Anyone know how to do this?

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

Expand the edges with a Minimum/ Maximu Filter and apply a Surface Blur/ Biderectional Blur to a duplicate layer and experiment with the thresholds. You may need to merge the duplicate with a white solid beforehand to minimise glitches. Then all that should be needed is a bit of touchup with brushes and clone stamps. Should be more than sufficient to get your overprint area for cutting. Doesn't need to be super precise, just avoid white areas popping through.

Mylenium

[c.pfaffenbichler]

Yeah, adding a bleed manually takes some time, but may be unavoidable. 

[Stephen_A_Marsh]

It is best if artwork is createed with bleed in mind from the beginning. If you have to add it afterwards, then two approaches come to mind:

1) Work on a duplicate layer. Selecting the white area (flattened image), but better if you already have a transparent image. It might be best to expand this selection so that it goes into the image area slightly rather than the in-between antialiased edges. Use content-aware fill. Inverse the selection so that only the objects are selected and not the trim areas. Expand the selection a little bit more. Add a layer mask. You should then have the original "clean" elements on one layer and the bleed on another below. 

2) Similar to what was mentioned by Mylenium, remove the white background so that you have transparency. Duplicate the layer and then run Filter > Other > Minimum to expand the pixels and then to layer this under the original layer so that is covered by the original, except for the edges that have been expanded.

These are just general suggestions, there will likely be more steps required, such as making better masks, or using edge masks, or retouching where the bleed touches the original pixels etc.

[c.pfaffenbichler]

There is also the issue of who creates the vector path for the die cutter and how the data needs to be delievered to the print provider. 

[Stephen_A_Marsh]

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@c.pfaffenbichler wrote:

There is also the issue of who creates the vector path for the die cutter and how the data needs to be delievered to the print provider. 

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Agreed, I skipped that bit!

If the path exists, then all selection should of course be based off the path.

If the path doesn't exist, that should be the start point, before bleed is added.