How to Convert an Image to an SVG in Inkscape: How to clean up a blended image for Design Space

okay so now I want to show you how to convert a more blended image now the reason that PNG and JPEG images can look so pretty it is because they have pixels and SVG files do not have pixels they have infinite amount of points around them so when we have a pixel it allows us to blend colors you see the sunflower image I have here has these yellows and oranges all blended together so when you're working with a more blended image like this you kind of have to do more cleanup when you're doing the conversion process so I want to show you the way that I clean some of my images up in this example here I got this sunflower image on free pick calm they have a lot of free images on there that you can use and they also have a very affordable image plan if you want to find images for converting things or even just using like print and cut projects so all I'm gonna do here is you can download it or you can right-click and save the image or copy the image I'm just going to copy it I'm going to come over here and this is what my image looks like after I go through the conversion process so I already did this because I just wanted to kind of get a feel for you know how it's gonna turn out how I was going to teach you guys so I'm going to paste that alright so here is my original image here this is a PNG image and we're gonna do exactly the same thing we did with the mermaid image except that we're gonna have to change a few things over here in the trace bitmap panel let me clear this off so we can again walk through from the beginning so you're not confused I'm gonna go up to path trace bitmap or you can do shift alt D on your keyboard and then this panel will open up here you want to make sure colors is selected you want to make sure this to stack the scans you want to have remove background ticked and you want to have live preview ticked okay and before with our mermaid tail we just did a couple of we did three scans this has a lot more colors to it so if we were to only do three with this bring these done if we would only do three that's what it would look like in the little preview box right there so it's not going to give us all the colors we want there might be cases where you want something like this and then you would just do exactly like that you would just bring the desired number of scans down but because I do want to capture the green and some of the other colors I'm going to take this up and we're gonna leave it at I think eight eight is pretty good it captures a majority of the colors that we're looking for and we're gonna delete some more of these skins in a minute but 8 is a good number here from our preview that we're able to assess there before we actually execute the trace so once you have everything set eight scans remove background stack scans live preview on colors go ahead and okay it's gonna take a second and then it's going to execute the trace and our copy is now what we're pulling off the top here and this is still our original underneath I'm just going to delete that get it off the canvas so it's not slowing down or interface at all and you can see now even the image here that I just convert it still looks very different than my final result now let me say depending on how much work you want to do you could leave it like this but you will just have a lot of layers to put on top of each other and generally don't recommend layering things like vinyl more than three you know three layers together because then it gets a little bit like thick and hard to work with so we want to try and pare this down a little bit more so we need to ungroup these layers so to ungroup just right click and go down to ungroup or you can do a shift alt G on your keyboard okay click off the image then click back on and start pulling the scans apart if he's all pulled apart let me get this over there a little more get these all pulled apart and then we want to start sort of assessing these scans to decide what we want to keep and what we want to delete I'm definitely gonna keep this background piece here because it's a good base piece so we're definitely keeping that one and I want to make sure I have some greenery showing so this one right here this green has a lot of the green color right where the leaves are and we can see in our preview image it's still present over here from the original and that kind of gives us an idea of where we want to look to make sure our colors are still coming through so I'm definitely gonna keep this one because I'm gonna want some of this greenery right here okay so I don't see any need for this one then this one didn't turn out very well it's kind of like choppy in some places and it's not fully it didn't even fully trace that one I just kind of added it as an extra color so I'm just gonna delete that one I'm just using my Delete key on my keyboard anytime I delete something so we're definitely keeping these and I'm probably gonna keep this one too because it makes a nice outline so see if we put that back over it kind of adds that that dark outline it goes around it's not perfectly stacked right now but it adds that nice dark outline so I'm gonna keep those three for sure and let's look at these remaining few that are right here this one here that's more of the brownish orange has more detailing to the petals and to the leaves and this one does not the lighter Orange so I'm gonna get rid of the lighter orange one and we're just gonna set this guy aside over here and I'm going to tell you why later on I'm just going to set him aside and I'm gonna pull these down now and I want to stack them back together because I want to see where I need to eliminate color because now we need to clean it up a little bit more if you need to get them perfectly stacked just bring them together like so and open up your line and distribute panel to open your align and distribute panel just do shift control a on your keyboard and right here you will see sector on vertical access and Center on horizontal access while all three of those scans are selected click on the vertical access and then click on the horizontal access and it will perfectly stack your scans so they are right back to the way they were when we trace them now we can see we have that nice brown outline then I probably won't really touch too much but the green is all over the place so I just want the green to show on these leaves here and on these leaves here the rest of the area I either want to change that color or I want to eliminate it altogether so I need to erase some of this green I need to get rid of it so there's there's lots of ways to do this but I'm going to try to give you guys the simplest approach because I know some of you di wires have never worked with a software like this and it's very overwhelming to just work through a video like this so I'm going to try and give you the least amount of steps with the easiest amount of tools possible and that would be the erase tool which is in your left toolbar towards the bottom and it's sort of like a little pink square so before you select that I want you to make sure you have the green layer selected right now I think I have the brown later selected let me let me see here click off the image yeah okay make sure your green layer selected and you can tell your green layer selected if you look down in the bar bottom left hand corner it will say fill and you'll see this green swatch that matches the green of our leaves that's how we know that it's selected because that's what's showing up here by our selection on our screen ok so make sure you've selected the greenery in this case and then select your erase tool now I'm gonna zoom in here and to zoom in just pinch your keypad on your laptop or you can use the zoom in and out button on the fourth icon down on the left side and we're gonna come in here and we're going to erase anywhere we don't want that great and we're not good don't worry about actually erasing all the greenery I just want you to focus on cutting it off where you want it to stop okay so right here I am gonna cut just like that I'm gonna come over here I don't want it going any farther than this here okay and I'm gonna come around the tip of it here and down and let's come down this way some more alright and more so here and what this is doing is it's cutting in the path here and it's gonna give us the ability to break this green apart so that we can keep what we want and get rid of what we don't want and because the green is what we have selected that's what's being erased and it's not touching the brown but the brown is giving us a guide of where we want the green to stop so it's pretty cool little trick there so I'm gonna come over here and do the same thing up here in this greenery area I'm gonna come right here start kind of in the middle let's bring this down I'm just continuing to erase if you don't get it perfect don't worry we're gonna do a second round of more detailed cleanup and we're gonna come around here let's see what we got going on here all right so we stopped here I'm gonna follow this line around just like that just tracing kind of the outline there of that leaf all right a little bit that's okay we can fix it all right so let's go ahead and pull off the brown so we can kind of see if we cut the path properly pulling the brown off here all right so we can see here how we erased all along that outline area here you can see I kind of missed a spot right there I'm just gonna grab my erase tool whoops gotta make sure that Green is selected grab my erase tool and come in there all right just making sure that it's everything has been properly divided if you have any places like this make sure you go back in with your erase tool and just cut the path with the eraser okay because there's a there's a reason you're gonna need to make sure that that's that way and I'm gonna show you why in just a second and that's all fine all right that's all fine let me check up here real quick all the way through there and to the top here all right that should be fine all right so now I'm gonna zoom out we've done our eraser step now I want you to pull the green off move it over here I want you to go up to path and go down to break apart while the green is selected when you do that you're really just gonna change and all these little pieces are gonna kind of get broken apart and cut out of what we have here okay the only piece is unconcerned about keeping here are the green piece is now I pulled the greenery off here and then we can see here that this greenery piece isn't coming apart which means we didn't erase something properly so let me zoom in here mm-hmm okay so right here is where we failed to erase so I'm just gonna grab that erase tool I'm gonna cut that path there and let's try again path break apart there we go now that piece releases and we don't need all this we're able to easily delete that I'm just gonna delete this here delete that I'm gonna hang on to this just for the time being because I might want to come back to it while you're working make sure you're saving your progress so make sure you save your file and you're doing ctrl s on your keyboard every couple minutes so that nothing is going to get lost if for any reason your computer was shut down on you so I have my two leaf pieces here and let me pull these back because they think I don't know if that's yeah I think that was supposed to be great yeah it's supposed to be great okay we're good alright so now I have my greenery pieces I'm gonna pull those back on top here to get a visual let me zoom in here we have just those greenery pieces that we wanted and I'm going to zoom way is I can get these aligned really well there we go that one's aligned let's come over here this one get it right there alright now let's pull over that Brown taste again the he'll be my doggy barking probably means someone's at my door all right so I'm gonna actually pull the brown piece over and then I'm actually going to hold shift on my keyboard and select the yellow piece as well and I'm gonna go back over to that align and distribute panel and I'm gonna just align it on that Center and horizontal access so that I know it's properly stacked together okay so we can see we did a pretty good job in tracing everything looks like where it should be if we zoom in really close here we'll notice that some of our pieces are kind of not right like this area here should be covered in green and it's not so in order to fix that we're just gonna edit a little bit more in detail I'm gonna click on that green piece right there I'm gonna go to the second tool down on the Left which is edit paths by nodes and I'm going to select some of these nodes by clicking and dragging and then I'm gonna hold one of the nodes down and pull it until it covers that area select and pull okay and we have this area here that's kind of sticking out too much so I'm going to select a bunch of those nodes but I'm just gonna hit delete and then I'm gonna hover over the line so that little hand appears and I'm gonna pull the line back there we go now it's behind the brown where it should be take a minute and look around to see if there's anywhere else so here's another piece right here that needs a little bit of fixing so I'm just gonna pull this up I'm selecting I'm grabbing a node when it's selected and I'm dragging it up okay same thing here I'm going to just grab the line and drag up I think that looks pretty good and when you're in here real close and you see some of these really tiny pieces pieces that really don't add to the image at all they're just kind of there because the image Trace that way feel free to get rid of them by just clicking dragging selecting those nodes and then hitting delete on your keyboard because you may want to eliminate just some of those messy spots so like here for example there's no point in there being this kind of cutout here in the yellow I'm just gonna select those nodes and delete it so that's a nice smooth area there's no point in having that there so that's that let's come over here and do the same thing with this white area deleting that alright there's a little area here that needs some help and I'm just gonna select those nodes I'm just gonna delete those and then I'm just gonna pull the line back there we go alright we have a really messy area right here that needs some cleanup so I'm going to grab all these nodes in this case here I left these two nodes right here untouched so that when I delete these they're still there and that way it doesn't change the entire line itself these notes that are down here I'm gonna grab them all together and then I'm gonna select let me try that again like grab them all okay and then hover and select one it does not cooperate with me there we go all right just pulling those over I'm just gonna pull this all the way over like so and then I'm gonna grab these little handles that are sticking out here and I'm gonna pull these down in okay gonna do that if you ever need to add a node back you would just hover over the line and double click and it will add a node so I just added one there and I'm gonna delete these and then that's gonna kind of smooth it out for me okay now I just need to go back down here and kind of fix this a little bit so I'm just gonna select some of these and hit delete and I'm gonna grab that line and tuck it back behind that Brown so that it is not sticking out there and I'm gonna add double click and add a node there and I'm gonna get rid of this little messy area pull this over and pull that down okay let's see what happens when you zoom out here still looks a little off so let's actually bring this right down here there we go all right that looks a little bit better it looks like our leaf kind of moved a little bit on us here perhaps so let's see some reason it jumped over on us there there we go it's a little bit more in line now let's go zoom back in for just a second there's a few other little areas we need to fix so you should be understanding now how to kind of clean up your image you're gonna be using that nodes tool and the erase tool and then you're just gonna kind of pull in the lines until everything is lining up as it should be and this is just one of the the layers that we're working on here so obviously when you're working with blended images you might have to do this for two or three or even more layers depending on how you you know what image you're using and how you want it to look so it does take some practice it does take patience I highly recommend working with some more simplistic images first and so you get better at this process and a little bit more familiar with it I have an entire program called free the SVG that I teach you everything from baby beginner steps starting right with downloading the software to working up to extremely advanced steps stuff step by steps so I definitely understand that this is like an intermediate lesson I'm just doing this for people who are interested in learning how it's done but this is not something where I would start a beginner with because this would be overwhelming so I am just showing you the process but if this is overwhelming to you that's just because you're a beginner and you need to start with the baby steps and if you want to learn more about joining my main program for this then I have that linked below this video for you alright so that's not too bad we could get a little more detail here but I don't want to waste too much time just getting to finite here overall the green is where it should be the yellow is where it should be and the brown is where it should be we could stop right here and say hey I'm happy with it or we can maybe add some shading in so I left this guy right over here that I told myself to save and I mentioned that to you guys I also left these green pieces over here just getting it real quickly zoom back in alright there we go and now I could take these pieces and I could kind of decide what I maybe want to add to the flower now I'm actually pretty happy with this like I would just like to keep it like this and we just created a three layer SVG really easily there and that took us about 25 minutes I went really slow here for you guys but once you get your pace up it might take you 10 minutes to do this but if I wanted to add some more of the orange yellow back in here you could grab some of these pieces that I left over here with the green and you could pull that in and then we could change the color let me open up my fill panel if you ever want to open up custom colors you have your colors down here in the footer but if you ever want to open up the custom colors just click in the bottom left-hand corner where it says fill and then will open up your fill and Stroke panel and this will give you a color wheel which will allow you to customize the exact color so this is too orange for my preference so I'm gonna move it a little bit more towards the yellow spectrum and I'm gonna just bring that a little darker it's a little too dark here we go you can type in custom color codes here but I'm just kind of eyeballing it and it's just giving it a little bit of a different shade if I wanted to I could bring this back in real quick this is our original image I'm just gonna bring this back in real quick and using my original image in the fill and Stroke panel let me click on that little piece we were just working with I'm gonna let me alright I got that little piece we were just working with and if I wanted to I could match the color so see kind of this deeper orange in our original here we could match that by taking this little eyedropper tool right here while the piece we want to change the color of is selected and go in here and I could select there we go so now I have that exact match of that orange that I liked in this original imagery so once I have that I can just delete that and then I could continue to grab some of these pieces over here if I wanted to to bring in some more orange color and use that dropper tool to change it you could also take this piece over here and if I wanted to I could come in here let's say this piece right here I could take my paint bucket tool and I could just drop my paint bucket tool in there my stroke is turned on I'm gonna turn that off and I just kind of created it cut out using my paint bucket tool and now I'm gonna bring this over I'm gonna line it up a little bit there there we go and now I added a nice orange texture to that one there so let me show you that one more time just so you understand with that what exactly I did there I'm grabbing pieces from the one we broke apart or you can use an existing piece and use your paint bucket tool on the left tool and you can drop the paint bucket tool in a bound area pull it over and place it where you want now I could leave it just like this if I wanted to or if I wanted the orange to be going down and touching the center I could again grab that nodes tool and I can maybe pull some of this down a little bit if I wanted to that's a little too far so I could maybe do this and I could shape it a little bit more to the actual area I could delete some nodes where we don't want them and we could kind of make it look like it's kind of coming from the center some of its coming from the center like that okay we could also do that over here because this one kind of looks a little odd like being cut off like this so we could grab this node here when we select our nodes tool to select your nodes you always can just go down to the second one over here or you can double click so right now I have this board selected if I wanted to edit the nodes on the brown then I would just if I had my selection tool I would just double click and then it changes it to notes so that's that's the shorthand way to do it in case anyone's wondering how I'm doing that all right so I'm just gonna pull this guide down a little bit more there and that looks a little bit better okay so you can see here how we've now added a little bit of that orange shading back in obviously like I said it's never gonna look exactly like the original image that's not possible because we're changing it to an SVG file it just resembles the original image and we kind of made the colors more turn the colors into layers versus having them blended so I'm going to save this let me add in this is bothering me let me add in this right here and I was thinking I'll leave it just like that just with this one I'm just gonna pull this one in and let me get that dropper tool to get it to be the same color orange and I'm just gonna leave it like that I could get I would if I was doing this for myself and like actually play me to do a project with it I would probably get a little more detailed and continue everything I've already showed you with grabbing the nodes tool and maybe just straightening these lines out a little bit more but I don't want to bore you guys to death probably more than I already have done so because you should understand the concept of what I've been showing you because we've gone over it several times now so I'm going to save this file and I'm gonna pull it into Inkscape so you can see how it turned out let me I'm just gonna give this off my screen here that off my screen this was my original one and I took a little bit more time on my original one here you can see I added some more of that orange color in so if I wanted to continue this flower you would just continue to repeat the same steps if you wanted to add somewhere that orange in so I'm gonna get rid of this one over here I already have my original you want to of course save it so you would do file save as just like we did with the other one save it as whatever you want Inkscape SVG save it to your location that you want it to be saved to and I already have it saved so I'm replacing the file now let's go over to design space let me take these guys off our screen and let's upload that sunflower image okay there it is saving it and click on it insert and again it seems to have jumped our imagery down way down there so we're just gonna change this to a zero and there it is I'm also noticing here that I have some stray little pieces that are registering down here we can't really see them so let me ungroup this and I'm just gonna there we go if that happens to you then just yeah there we go I think we're good now all right I'm gonna enlarge this and it's gonna make it look a little bit more like our original did in Inkscape and there we go so now I can ungroup these and I can use my attach tool or my well tool if I want to weld anything here like for example I might want to weld all of these darker all of these darker pieces here maybe I want to attach all those together I don't know why my screen is jumping down like that little Cricut design space moments alright and to select all these I'm just holding my shift key and clicking to select what I want and then I'm just gonna weld there we go now all of those darker yellow pieces are together and then we have that brown piece and we have this as well and we have this as well and I'm noticing here now that I brought this in these little marks right here I could have cleaned this up better in Inkscape so let me go back and show you pull this off pull this off here's those little marks that we're seeing they're in design space so to get rid of those I would just select that nodes tool and select the yellow I would drag over and delete those nodes and that gets rid of them if you ever want to unite something together to where you don't have to weld like we did when we got into design space here we had to weld these pieces together if you want it to come in already like that and you don't want to do the weld step and you want to do that design space I'm sorry in Inkscape sorry I meant saying scape there's a really easy way to do that you would just click and drag to select those colors you want there you can also go up to you can also have one selected and go up to edit and down to select same fill color and it'll select all that exact same color then you can go up to path and Union and all those pieces are now together okay so that's another way to do that basically path and Union is the same thing that's weld in design space if you want it to be a little bit more clean here with your leaves you could come in here and we could kind of clean these up a little bit more and just sort of make the edges look a little more smooth here because they are a little bit jagged because we use the eraser tool however I'm not even gonna see those so unless for some reason Cricut has a problem cutting it out which I don't know why it would I'm just gonna leave it at this because it's not even gonna be seen and it's not a big deal so that is the steps the many many steps learning how to convert everything from a simple image to a more blended image into a layered SVG file that can be used inside of Cricut design space this is kind of an intermediate to advanced lesson if you've never done anything like this you're probably gonna have to have to either watch the video several times or you're gonna kind of want to start with more beginner steps and if you're interested in learning my entire process for going from a beginner to where I'm at I would love for you to join me inside of my free the SVG course which I have linked below for you but I hope for those of you who are looking for a video that kind of went into more detail that this helps some of you and I'll see you guys next time

Channel: Abbi Kirsten Gillespie

Views: 57,784

Keywords: convert image to svg, inkscape tutorial, how to draw your own svg files, design space tutorial, make your own svg files for cricut design space, clean up an svg in inkscape, layered svg file, free svg file downloads, how to make svg files for cricut, cricut design space how to, tracing an image, upload svg to design space, make svg files cricut, convert svg, convert png, convert jpeg, edit svg file, abbi kirsten

Id: zReB2kR06bg

Length: 33min 13sec (1993 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 06 2020