Remove the background/trim the irrelevant portions of the image

• The best results are obtained when your image contains a single element to reproduce, like for example a single human face (which is what you typically see in real-life applications of this class of algorithms). If there are many constrasting background elements the algorithm may struggle to reproduce everything; it’s therefore recommended to at least crop your image, so that only e.g. the close-up face remains.

• Another option is to use any AI sticker app (e.g. default Samsung gallery app) to extract only your main target, so that there is an empty background. If your app of choice returns a PNG image with a transparent background in place of the original one (i.e. it appends a 4th alpha channel after the RGB ones), please know that StringArt will deal with this automatically, so you don’t have to worry about that.

• The important thing to know is that in this case StringArt will replace the transparent background with the user-specified background color (see parameters help section); this can be anything, but a dark color (like the default dark gray) is recommended, as otherwise you may get the same issue described in the previous point. Try tweaking these RGB values if you see that the algorithm is struggling with the empty background (i.e. spending too much/too little time drawing lines there, etc.).