First, my apologies for disobeying "Dirty Harry's rule" :-

"A man's gotta know his limitations" 😁

I used to work in Dubai back in the 90's and despite having many photos and videos of my time there, the one thing I didn't have a clear picture of was the Reg Plate of my Land Cruiser!

All I have is a rather blurry video frame, so I've downloaded a few similar shape and style plates and want to construct a replica, using the text elements and other artefacts from these random pictures.

This will involve first removing some detail from one "master" shot, then replacing some digits and re-ordering others, and finally adding the "Date Coin" for want of a better word!

Guess I'm trying to run before I can walk, but can anyone lead me by the nose to videos which might enable me to achieve this without too much pain?😉

Thanks in advance

By the way, I'm using Inkscape 0.92 with Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon.

Before proceeding further, I'd update to Inkscape 1.3.2, which runs on Mint 20 just fine.

I'd use the PPA:  https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.3/gnulinux/ubuntu/ppa/dl/

Had a feeling you'd say that!

I'm on my Windoze machine at the moment and will try to update the laptop tomorrow.

My fairly limited experience has been with PSE down the years and also Gimp (which some times confounds me!) so my expectations are low! 😅

Not sure if the differing resolutions of the gleaned jpg's will be a problem when converted to svg, Can they be "re-sampled" so that copied sections of one file can be pasted into another?

If that even makes sense!

As you can probably see, I've a lot to learn!

Before you begin, be aware that Inkscape's native svg file is a "vector" image, while your jpg photographs are "raster" images. Vector images are made of mathematically defined curves and raster images are made from a grid of coloured squares. A quick web search will describe the differences in more detail. Converting a blurry jpg to svg will not produce a good image.

Inkscape is a vector editor with some basic raster functions. You can chop up jpg images and rearrange the pieces as you described, but it's not the best tool. Gimp is excellent but, as you said, it's complex. You could try paint.net or Pinta. These are much simpler than Gimp, though perfectly capable of copying regions from one jpg image and rotating, scaling and overlaying them in another.

Hi @Paddy_CAD, thanks for that. Despite knowing little about "Vector" images aside from the fact they are scalable mathematical files; so totally different to jpg or even RAW which I'm used to manipulating.

In my ignorance I had thought that a conversion from raster to Vector would "magically" sharpen up the images!

That bubble was popped as soon as I converted my first rather poor jpg, enlarging the resulting svg just made it more blocky, in the same way that jpg enlargements did.

I tried to clean it up as a jpg using PSE, but as the old adage goes, you can't polish a "brown thing"!

I'll have to scour the net for better quality pics.

Meanwhile I'll download Paint.net and Pinta to their respective habitats and have a play around.

Thanks for helping, I'm sure I'll be back once I've confounded myself, ...which won't take long! 😊

@Paddy_CAD, Wires crossed I think!

having downloaded and installed Paint.net, I find it cannot handle svg images.

I already have Photoshop Elements 2019 and the rather less intuitive Gimp, so both Paint.net and Pinta are of little us guess I'll have to find my way using Inkscape. 😱

I understood from #1 and #3 above that your starting point is a selection of jpg images extracted from a video. If so, Pinta, paint.net or Gimp is the way to go. If you have svg files (and there's nothing you want to keep private), feel free to upload them here for us to experiment with.

Hi Paddy, yes that's almost right, I have only a blurry still from a video of my original plate.

Thinking I could possibly create a composite to "imitate" a clear image of the plate I downloaded a few similarly styled plates in order to use individual "numbers" and other elements from them to construct a new "image".

I mistakenly thought that converting the jpg's to svg would crisp up the images I wanted to use, making the task easier and the final result scalable. 

I understand now that the quality of the source jpg's is fundamental.  

There is nothing private, so I'll upload the images and see what you think can be achieved.

"My Reg.jpg" is the frame from a video, as the model I wish to achieve.

"Dxb_Plate_77-04.svg" is a converted jpg (via inkscape) which could be used as the "base", including some of the digits and the left hand panel.

"uae-dub_12949.jpg" is another image harvested from the web in order to just used the number "2", along with it's Arabic script to complete the plate.

The "Date Coin" being green rather than the original yellow is of no consequence for my purpose and despite being a different resolution to the other harvested plates, the actual size looks as if it would be OK.

Hope I've explained that with enough lucidity from my imaginings!

Lordy! this is addictive!

Thought I'd just rough out a construct using jpg's and I've tweaked it and tweaked it, probably not as good as it could be, but I'm surprised how well it's turned out.

Might see if it will improve when converted to svg tomorrow!

March 2nd.

Just an update from my Linux machine, having opened "My plate 1.jpg" and saved it as svg, I'm pleased with the result.

just a Query; should it really open as such a tiny image?

I know that as a Vector Image, it is scalable, but should it really start from such small beginnings, or have I done something wrong?

I notice that it isn't possible to increase the displayed size beyond 500% in image viewer or in web browser.

Just looking at he finished file on my phone, I notice that there are lighter white "tracks" all over the background, probably from e erasing various artifacts from my pasting of the digits etc.

Is there a way to tidy that up?

I don't think it will be possible in PSE as there are sooo many layers!