How to convert a Cadence Schematic Image into White diagram

5/5 - (4 votes)

Often we deal or receive a black background the typical black-background Cadence schematic that we wish to convert to a white-background Schematic… How?

When and Why Avoid Black Schematics?

It is very anoying and frustrating when presenting a well-lit room with a projector, the black-backgrounded schematics are barely visible. Those tiny blue wires become almost invisible… or when we creating a printable document, report or thesis, you don’t want to print a full black ink page. Specially with inkjet printers that wrinkle the paper… ugggggghhhh!!!! Additionaly, capturing a window snapshot results in you can only get the black schematic.

Sumarizing, balck-backgrounded schematics are not suitable for…

Well-lit rooms presentations
Printable documents
Window snapshots

While we are used to designing circuits the iconic black background featuring Cadence signature red pins, green labels and orange annotations … but not always!!

In this short tutorial, I will explain how to efficiently convert quickly a black schematic into a white one.

From this…..

…. to this

Note: If you are thinking that… it is not only inverting the colors of the picture!!

Sometimes the fastest way is to open Cadence and export again the image from the schematic, but often we don’t have Cadence available at that moment.

Once you know how to do it, it is very very easy and quick to make the conversion of the already exported black schematic. I would say 30 seconds!!

Schematic conversion in 4 easy Steps

To make the conversion, I am using Gimp, the free “Photoshop”, an open source image editor. You can download the last version on the official website on gimp.org/downloads.

Once we have executed GIMP and the window is opened, we can drag and drop the black schematic to GIMP we want to convert.

Original schematic exported by Cadence with black background

1- The first step is to Invert the colors

Colors -> Invert

We get the following:

2- The next step is to convert to the Gray Scale

Image -> Mode -> Gray Scale

3- Now we saturate the image

Colors -> Levels

We move the middle “entry levels” slider to the end (right) and click Accept.

This is the result:

4- The last step is to convert it to Black & White colors.

Image -> Mode -> Index and select “black and white (1 bit)”

Congratulations!!! We have converted the ugly black picture into a nice and white Cadence schematic 🙂

Now it is time to save the image as png, jpg or any other file type. You can save it with the keybind Ctrl + Shift + E.

Thin Lines in the Schematic

It happens, that if the schematic was exported with high dimensions (high number of pixels), the wires and lines would be very very thin and almost invisible…