Complete Guide to Trace Bitmap Inkscape 1.2

hello welcome to another video on inkscape in this video I'm going to be taking a look at the trace bitmap function of inkscape we're going to take a look at how we can use single scan from either simple designs or from photos like these and also be taking a look at multi-colored scans so we can create Vector traces like these stick with us [Music] so if you want to use the trace bitmap function of inkscape the first thing we're going to need to do is open up the trace bitmap dialog box so to do that we're going to come up to the top here we're going to click on path and down here we've got Trace bitmap we click on trace bitmap and that'll open up our dialog box now at the top of our dialog box we've got three different tabs that we can use the first tab single scan creates a single path from the image so when we use this one we just create a single path multi-color when we use multi-color this creates multiple paths we can color them we can have them different Shades of Gray pixel arts is for trying to make a decent picture from pixelated art so the artwork that you used to get on the old-fashioned video games I'm not going to look at pixel art in this video I'm mainly going to concentrate on single scan and multi-color so to get started the first thing you're going to need to do is import your image that you want to trace so to do that we can come up to file down to to import find the image that you want to import we can double click on the image locate all the settings I've imported it already and rescaled it let's just put that into the middle so the first one I've got is this single color well saying that it looks single color but if we just move over to the side it's actually made up of two colors I drag it off to the side here and you can see that it's got a white background now this won't affect our scan we'll just be scanning the black so if we move it back I'm going to press six on the keyboard just to centralize our page again and with our image selected we can then come back over to our Trace bitmap dialog box and start adjusting the settings to how we want it so the first thing we want to do is Select single scan so in here we've got a few different settings that we can adjust the third first one is detection mode so if we just click on the drop down menu we've got brightness cut off we've got Edge detection color quantization Auto trace and Centerline Auto Trace for the time being we're going to stick with brightness cutoff under that we've got threshold this allows us to dictate what percentage of the brightness is included within our image the image that they're using to start with is just a black and white logo so adjusting this isn't going to make a great deal of difference we'll look at that in Greater detail when we look at photos and multi-colored images below threshold we've got invert image if we select our image we can click on invert image and it will flip which parts of the design creates our path so it's always the dark area in our preview window that becomes the path so if we have it not inverted the black area within our preview window will be the path but if we click on the inverts it will use the background to create the path we'll click that back under that we've got details so the first one is Speckles this allows us to adjust what inkscape will ignore so we've got Speckles up to two pixels it will ignore them below that we've got smooth Corners this basically does what it says on the tin it will just slightly smooth out those sharp Corners below that we've got optimize optimizes similar to simplify it tries to reduce the number of nodes within the image so it'll it'll join sections together and just remove nodes depending on the settings dictates how much it's going to simplify our path underneath that we've got user assisted trace this just allows you to try and help inkscape decide what needs to be traced we cover that in in a little bit more detail later on underneath that we've got the preview window the preview window just shows our image with the different settings applied and then it will use this image to trace to create our Vector graphic so this is a good representation of what we're going to have when we've finished our Trace so if we're happy with all our settings we can go ahead and we can click apply so it's now created our Vector copy of our image and it's sat it on top of the original image so if we just drag it off to one side we can see our two images although they look identical at the moment because we're on a white background there are differences so if we come up and grab the rectangle tool I'm just going to drag out a rectangle we'll just sit it there we grab our selection tool we drop it down to the bottom so it sits behind our design and we can see that our original design had this white background if we now move our rectangle behind our bitmap Trace you can see that our tracing is a single path so it doesn't have the two colors the White and the black it purely has the black logo design so if we move down to our next image I'll just get rid of that rectangle so it's out of the way we select our raccoon down the bottom here and because this has got different colors within the image depending on how we set the threshold we can pick up different amounts of the brightness so at the moment with it set to 0.45 we're picking up the darker colors but it's ignoring this light gray behind however if we adjust it we can increase it slightly and when we get to a certain point they'll include the light gray as well as the dark so now we're still getting a single path But it includes the two darker colors leaving the white background and we can see the two different copies that we can make so if we move down we can take a look at a photo so I've used this in a in a previous video and we used Trace bitmap to create a single path from this image so we're just going to use it again so if we click on it this time when we use brightness threshold it makes more of a difference what we can do because this is a very small preview window if we drag this over it'll allow it to our image to grow to fit the window so we've got a better view of our image so now when we use threshold it's going to make quite a lot of difference because we got such varying brightnesses within our image depending on where we set it we can adjust how much of the image is included so I quite like that we can either set it so the background is the path or we can use the invert we want to change it and have it the other way around for this example I'm going to keep it so that the background is the path and then I'm going to press apply you can drag it off to the side again I don't want these blobs on the side here so all I'm going to do for that to get rid of those is we just zoom in a little bit I'm going to get my bezier tool and I'm literally just going to roughly Trace these out I'm not taking much care in this example and then what we can do is come up select our selection tool hold down shift select the image behind come up to path and come down to Union and that will effectively remove those holes from our path so we end up with this quite effective single path design so that's brightness cutoff that we've looked at let's have a quick look at all the others so brightness cut off we've we've looked at brightness cutoff already we're going to press apply just to apply it and then we can move it over and we've got an example of brightness cutoff so let's go down our list and do Edge detection so Edge detection looks for contrast in the image so it knows where edges are we can adjust our threshold to determine how much of a contrast it needs between the the two sides of an edge and as you can see we can get quite dramatically different results using this Edge detection so if we bring it down we'll stick with that we press apply and it gives us a result using Edge detection color quantization now this works slightly differently I'm quickly going to skip over to multi-color so using multi-color we can create multiple traces to build up our image at the moment this is set to eight scans so it's broken down our image into eight different brightness steps so each one of these brightness steps is a separate path in its own right when we use color quantization in our single scan what it does is split it down into the number of steps similar to this and then alternates which one is included within the path so want to be included the next one won't the next one will next one won't and we end up with a striped effect so let's go back to single scan and give it a go we go up to color quantization and you can see how it alternates the different color steps so we've got eight colors we can increase it to get more stripes or of course reduce it to get less I think that'll do so I'm happy with that so I'm going to press apply and we get our color quantization the next one we got down here is auto trace this is just using a slightly different algorithm to do a similar thing so if we click on our drop down menu we get Auto trace and we've got adjustments we can make in here with auto Trace I think we're a uses a different algorithm it doesn't affect the preview Windows all we're getting is the original image we can adjust things up here you can't you can't see it changing the image in any way it doesn't seem to work on the preview window I think because it's a different algorithm doesn't work but we can adjust our settings to whatever we want and then we can click apply and get an auto Trace so we can drag that one down seem to have changed that color at some point let's put it back to black after Auto Trace we've got this Center Line tracing Auto Trace so this uses the auto Trace algorithm if we select on this we can't actually see what's happening but if we press apply we get this rather unique geometric design I'll just put it there I'll hold down shift I'll just change our design to Black I'm just going to stretch it out so we can see it so I'm going to hold down control so I don't change the proportions and if we zoom in a bit we can see that we get this this rather unique looking geometric design with lots of diagonal lines we can shrink that back down and bring it down the bottom so they're the different options that we got available to us again this is just for single scan so we've accomplished all these different effects with just the single scan option next one I want to look at is multi-color which creates multiple scans so I've just come back to our raccoon logo and we're going to use this just just initially to show you some of the different settings within our multi-color so if we click on our multi-color tab at the top in here we've got a few different settings now so if we just quickly look at detection modes we've got our brightness steps which we had before we've also got colors Grays and auto Trace so we can choose between those we go for colors for now we've got scans which determines the amount of traces that we want to take so with colors it'll split it into eight colors and make at eight separate paths to represent those colors below that we've got smooth so with this now what it does is it puts a certain amount of blur onto the image and then traces that image and this has the effect of smoothing out any rough edges so it effectively Smooths the edges of our of our paths our next option along is stack just to illustrate what stack does I've created a new page and I've just opened up this image of a ball so we're going to select the image and with stack not selected we're going to click apply to create our image we drag that one over that's our tiled image we select our our original image again and this time we're going to use stack and press apply so our first glance these two images don't look too dissimilar it's not until we look closer that we start to realize there there are quite big differences the top image that we did without the stack applied creates a set of tiles that sit side by side on our page the big problem with this is we've get if we zoom in we can see we've got all these gaps between our different images and because we're cutting out a tile for each individual color it means we've got to have more complex paths to represent those different colors we can see this if we break the image down into the separate colors when we create a multi-colored scan what it does is group all the different scans together so if we click on ungroup we can split them up into the different colors we click off to deselect them all and then when we just drag these colors apart we can see that each individual color is a complex path in its own right whereas if we come down to our stacked image we ungroup this one the same we click off and this time when we drag out the separate colors we can see that they're more simplistic piles stacked one on top of the other so they're easier to produce you don't get the gaps in between and I think they're just generally a better option so I'd leave the Stacked option uh always ticked so let's take a look at how we can produce some multi-colored images from photos so here I've got an image of a blue tit if we click on it at the moment we've got it set on single scan brightness cut off so we're going to come over to the multi-colored scan so in here from detection mode I've got colors set we could have of course had the brightness steps Grays or Auto Trace under that number of scans I've got set at eight um I haven't turned on the smoothing we've got stack applied and I'm just going to apply that image to see what it comes out like so we can drag our image off to one side and there's our 8 scan image so under the stack and smooth we've got this extra option called remove background what remove background actually does is just take away the bottom layer so depending on what color the bottom layer is it'll remove that color from our image so now with the remove background selected I'll select the image again and we'll press apply and see what happens yeah so we've created another image with background removed so at first glance these two images don't look that much different it hasn't removed the blue background but what it's done is removed the bottom layer so if we drag this over the the image of our women over here we can see that we've it sits removed the bottom layer which in this case seems to be the white color of the feathers so it's it's had an attempts at removing the background but it's just removed the wrong color so if you're not getting the results that you're expecting and that's likely to be y so if we wanted to remove the blue background what we could do is turn off the remove background turn off the stack we click on our image we press apply because this time it's going to create our image with tiles if we remove the light blue it should remove the background so I'll drag our image off to the side again the image quality doesn't look as good because we've we've done it without the stack so we're going to have gaps in between our different colored layers but regardless we're going to click on the ungroup click off click our light blue press delete and we can get rid of our background that way so that's just another option you've got if you wanted to remove the background if we want our images to look more detailed we can add more layers the problem of adding more layers is the more layers we've got the more complex it is and the slower your computer is going to run but I'm going to increase this to 20. we need to select our image so we've got a preview down the bottom here and we can press apply and it will produce our image we can drag it off to the side with the trace bitmap it's very good at creating these more complex areas of color it's the areas of very similar colors that tend to get turned into blocks of colors and may need a bit of extra work so that's quite a good representation we move down and we have a look at the girl's face so we just zoom in slightly I'm going to select my image this time I'm going to increase it up to 40. and I'm going to press apply so that down we can drag our image over and you can see it makes quite a good copy the hair looks very detailed which is great but there's smoother gradients tend to look not quite so impressive and another thing that tends to happen because we've got a reduced color palette the colors quite often look slightly washed out so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to come up to filters down to color and then down to Brilliance we want to click on the live preview and then we can just make some fine adjustments so what I'm going to do is just zero all these to start with when you press zero on brightness it's actually default is one but it'll change it to that anyway so we just change all these go down change them to zero to set them so our image hasn't been changed in any way shape or form we can then add a little bit of color by increasing the saturation so whenever you do this you want to make small adjustments and you can just increase your image until you're happy with it I think I prefer it like that so I'm going to keep my image like that sometimes when you make these small increments using the um plus and minus buttons up here the adjustments are still too much so you can actually come in and just make finer adjustments by changing the figures inside and do it that way actually that looks quite good so I'm going to keep that so I'm going to press apply once it's applied we can get rid of our dialog box and we've got our image there so I think for a vector a vector copy of our photo that that's quite good especially the hair like I say where you've got these more complex color changes it's picked up really well by the trace bitmap function it's where we've got smooth gradients like the cheeks and the lips and the whites of the eyes it's not as not so effective so you may need to do extra work um to improve these elements if we zoom in one thing I noticed is a reflection in the eyes doesn't seem to be quite as bright as they could be so to correct that I'm just going to come up get my ellipse tool we're zoom in a bit and I'm just going to drag an ellipse over the top of the white there it looks like we've got a stroke applied so if you hold down shift click on the X down the bottom we can change that um I'm going to come up grab my selection tool and I'm just going to adjust that slightly move it into place so I'm going to press Ctrl D to duplicate it we move our image over I'm going to move my lips over I'm going to shrink it down a bit so it more closely represents the one on this side and if we zoom out we can see that we've created quite a realistic copy of our original photo so user assisted Trace what user assisted Trace does it allows you to try and help inkscape to work out what part of the image is the foreground so for example we want to just have this bird we don't want all this background junk we just want this bird and we want it to try and remove the background so what I'm going to do is come over and grab my bezier tool and I'm just going to draw just a rough object over the top which includes the section of the image that I want to be the foreground and some of the background if we reduce the opacity we can see our image underneath I think I'll also just change the color of our guide path so now we can hold down shift select our main image we're going to come back over select our Trace bitmap dialog box and if we look down now at the preview we've cut out all of that background so let's press apply and see what we get first thing we need to do is delete our guide object off the top now if we zoom into this it's done a fairly good job we've got some little bits of blue showing around the edges what it has done though is is left this white background on so I want to back step this time I've added remove background I'm going to select the mask I'm going to select hold down shift and select our main image and I'm going to press apply so we can click off we can delete our mask and we can remove our main image as we move this across you'll notice that there's holes within our image that are the same color as the white background if you wanted to fill in the holes one way we can do this is to make a copy so we can press Ctrl D to duplicate it we can then ungroup it we can then come to path Union we can then go path break apart what this does is separates all of the little subparts that are inside it we can then come up to path Union again so now we've just made a solid shape since the holes within our image were white we can turn this shape to White and then we can drop it to the bottom so it's behind the rest of our image and drag the box over the top we can group it all together click on the group button and now when we drag that over the top of our our Blue Sky we can see that we've filled in the missing sections with white so the user assisted Trace does work quite well when you've got a foreground object that's completely a different color from the background and the background is a pretty uniform color the results do vary from image to image so you may have to use other means to cut out your foreground image one last thing I wanted to go over is how you can scan just a small area of your image let's say this image isn't too bad because most of the background is made up with blue but say I just wanted to scan this balloon and nothing else what I've done here is I've made a mask that sits over the top so if I press Ctrl Z to move it back over the top now I can clip this image by holding down shift select in the background color coming up to object down to clip over to set clip and that cuts out my image it's now on the canvas all I've got visible is the singular balloon but if we look over at our Trace bitmap dialog box you can see that we've got all of the original photo so even if you've got something clipped it still picks up the whole of the original image the only way we can change this is to save this image as a image in its own right so if we come up to file down to export if we come back over click on import import our image back in we can click ok to all the settings now our image only consists of the masked balloon so this time if we come up to trace bitmap our image is only going to be that balloon so now if we press apply we can get a direct copy of that balloon on its own so I think that'll do us for this video if you've got any questions leave them in the comments below and I'll get back to you if not thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Create For Free

Views: 35,355

Keywords: complete guide, complete guide to inkscape, complete guide to trace bitmap, trace bitmap inkscape, svg editor, inkscape trace bitmap, conver bitmap to svg, trace outline, trace an image, raster to svg, auto trace, convert to .svg, learn inkscape, raster to vector, drawing software, free download, inkscape tutorials, vector program, Inkscape, Design, Tutorials, Tips, Logo, Trace Bitmap, Vector. Raster, vectorize, vector graphics, raster image, graphic design, digital art, vector

Id: e9pPdvJu8mg

Length: 24min 23sec (1463 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 24 2022