Alright, so the other day, I got this itch. I really wanted some dim sum png files. Don’t ask me why, sometimes my brain just latches onto these weird little projects. Maybe I was hungry, maybe I was thinking of a little design thing, who knows. The point is, I decided I needed them.
My first thought was, “Easy peasy, I’ll just search online.” You know, type in “dim sum png” and a million perfect, ready-to-use images will pop up. Well, let me tell you, that was a bit of a dream. Sure, there were some, but a lot of them were kinda low quality, or had those annoying watermarks, or just weren’t the specific types of dim sum I was picturing in my head. You know how it is when you have a specific vision?
My Grand Plan: Make Them Myself!
So, plan B: I decided I’d make my own. How hard could it be, right? Famous last words. I figured I’d either take some photos myself or find some really good, high-resolution JPEGs and then just cut out the backgrounds. Sounds simple enough on paper.
Taking photos myself? That was a short-lived idea. I tried snapping a few pics the next time I got dim sum. The lighting in restaurants is never quite right for this kind of thing, is it? Shadows everywhere, weird reflections. Plus, I felt a bit daft pointing my phone meticulously at each little dumpling while people were trying to eat. So, scratch that.
Okay, onto finding good JPEGs. This took a while. Lots of scrolling, lots of searching. Eventually, I found a few that looked pretty decent – clear, good lighting, nice focus. “Right,” I thought, “now for the ‘easy’ part: removing the background.”
The Great Background Removal Battle
I fired up my trusty old image editing software – you know the one, the free one that everyone uses. I’m not a pro designer or anything, but I know my way around the basic tools. Or so I thought.
I started with a nice picture of some siu mai. Looked simple enough. I grabbed the magic wand tool, clicked on the background, and… it selected bits of the siu mai too. Okay, adjust the tolerance. Click again. Still not perfect. Then I tried the lasso tool, painstakingly trying to trace around the edges. My hand started cramping up. This was not the quick job I’d envisioned.
- The little bits of garnish? Nightmare.
- The steam, if there was any visible? Forget about it.
- Those translucent wrappers on things like har gow (shrimp dumplings)? Oh boy.
I spent, and I’m not kidding, probably a good hour on that first siu mai. Deleting, undoing, zooming in so close I could see the pixels laughing at me. My respect for people who do this for a living went up about a thousand percent.
It’s funny, really. I think this whole dim sum png obsession was just a way for me to avoid doing something actually important I had on my to-do list. You know how you find these little “urgent” tasks when you’re procrastinating? This was definitely one of those. Instead of tackling that big report, I was wrestling with a digital dumpling.
A Glimmer of Hope (and a Decent PNG)
After a lot of trial and error, and watching a couple of quick online tutorials (the kind where they make it look super easy, which is just salt in the wound), I started to get a bit of a system down.
I found that using a combination of tools worked best. A bit of the magic wand for the obvious bits, then careful work with the path tool (or pen tool, whatever your software calls it) to draw around the trickier edges. Layer masks became my best friend. That way, if I messed up, I wasn’t actually deleting pixels, just hiding them. It was still slow going, especially for the more complex shapes like those beautifully folded soup dumplings or anything with intricate details.
I even tried to get clever with some of the steam effects on a picture of a freshly steamed bun. Let’s just say that ended up looking more like a foggy mess than appetizing steam. Some things are best left to the imagination, or to people with way more skill than me.
The Result: My Own Little Dim Sum Collection
So, after what felt like an eternity (but was probably just a few evenings of dedicated, slightly obsessive work), I had a small collection of dim sum PNGs. A few siu mai, some har gow, a couple of char siu bao, even a spring roll or two. They weren’t perfect, not by a long shot. If you zoomed in, you could probably still see some wobbly edges. But they were mine. I made them.
What did I learn from all this?
- Making clean PNGs with transparent backgrounds is way harder than it looks, especially with food.
- Patience is a virtue, especially when tracing around tiny, fiddly bits of digital food.
- Sometimes, the “quick little project” you start to avoid work ends up being a whole lot of work itself.
Now I’ve got this folder on my computer labeled “Dim Sum PNGs.” I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with all of them yet. Maybe I’ll use them for a blog post (meta, right?), or print them out and make tiny magnets. Who knows. But it was an experience, that’s for sure. And hey, at least I didn’t have to do that report right away.