Inkscape Lesson 11 - Trace Bitmap Tool (Convert Raster to SVG)

hey guys welcome back to another Inkscape tutorial in this video I want to show you one of my most favorite tools in Inkscape and that's the trace bitmap tool so you go to path and then you go to trace bitmap when you have an image selected so we're gonna be playing with that today it's a really really cool tool in the last video we traced using the Bezier tool we traced an image of a guy falling we're gonna do that again only we're not going to use the Bezier tool so I'm going to drag this image in this is an image you can find out where we got it in the last video we were trying to pixabay.com and search person we downloaded this free image so you can follow along if you want to do that but now we're gonna do this again only instead of tracing it oops ctrl Z I'll make sure I lock this like I like to do so instead of tracing it like we did last time we like zoomed in and we traced every single point of here and created this whole little outline we're not gonna do that this time we're going to just use this tool that's built into Inkscape so we go to we select the image and then we go to path and then we go to trace bitmap and it comes up with these different options so brightness cutoff and a certain threshold we'll just leave it in here right now and we'll click update so if we hit update it shows us a little preview of what it'll look like if we were to go ahead and try and trace all the lines of this image based on the brightness of the pixels so that looks okay let's just see what that looks like so if we hit OK it'll take a minute and they'll actually do that so it traced it created a path here and we can drag and see what it looks like so this is what it's created based off of this image and this is all a vector path so if we zoom in we can see that's actually pretty cool detail so we see this guy here and yeah I like it and so we can actually go in now if we edit the different nodes we can come in and edit different parts of this and change it too so essentially it did what we just tried to do with the Bezier tool didn't do as good a job though if you notice because look here in the face you so where my head I'll just close this so here in the face it's a little bit it didn't get the whole face but did get some of the eyebrow it got some more detail than we actually got got some detail in the hair so it's not a complete silhouette but instead of just traced everything based on the the brightness of the pixel it's super cool huh but the thing is it's all tied together here I'm not sure if there's different layers we can tell we can check by going ctrl shift G and see if we can ungroup anything here and it looks like it's all just one level so we'd need to cut this out which we can do but first I'm just going to delete this let's come back up and let's try again so we click on our image and then we go to path trace bitmap so instead of doing the brightness cut off well we can just change the threshold so we can lower this to maybe and change the 4 to a 1 and go update and then it gets just the person but it doesn't get all the person so then we don't have that if we hit OK we see we get this kind of thing going so we get more detail in the shirt but it's a lot lighter so it's still this isn't perfect for what we want to do although it is kind of cool if we did want to keep this let's just keep it for fun let's turn it red and let's bring it over here because then what we can do is go to our edge detection and do the same thing so we hit update and now it's going to show us a preview of the edge detection oh nothing is selected right now we have to make sure we have our picture selected that we want to trace our bitmap and it has to be a bitmap if we select a vector it won't do anything has to be a bitmap that we're tracing which this is it's a JPEG image I think so we hit update and now it'll show ok so let's change this threshold that's lower lower this down to maybe 3 5 hit update that's still not quite where we want let's go way down to 0.06 that's pretty cool I'm gonna go down even lower oh not to 0 update so 0.10 wait okay so now we've got another thing traced oh I got a little piece of something up here it looks like but that's pretty neat huh and so now we have this outline here which did a pretty good job of doing the edge detection it wasn't doing it wasn't tracing based off of the brightness of the pixels it was tracing based off of the edge that it could find like a hard edge which I guess probably uses some sort of brightness to detect it anyway but now we can move this over let's send this to the top layer and now we have like we can kind of merge and create a really cool looking thing maybe turn this blue or like yeah like a green so we can create a really cool look by merging these two together that's pretty neat huh see if I can select both of them at the same time click and shift click click shift click there we go so now we have this cool kind of effect going on here and we can keep doing this we can get different layers that we want to out of this so we can click our bitmap again and then this is still opened up so whatever's clicked here we'll just get updated so we can go to color quantization it's a word you don't use very often cover quantization so we click update and what that's going to do it's going to create something like this but it's gonna do it with eight different colors so I'm gonna do it just to illustrate all the four colors and hit update so using just four colors it's going to it's going to basically break this image into four different colors thresholds so I'll click click okay and then we can come down here and so that's created a pretty cool thing and we've got different colors here so if we hit ctrl shift G and ungroup we can see there's different there should be different noted before right ctrl shift G okay maybe it's just did for whatever reason it did two colors it's just black and white that's kind of cool too though so just kind of play around with this and you can see so let's let's take it up again to six do update update do okay I'm trying to get different colors here I think we can get it now it's doing all black do I have a setting that's only doing black somewhere I should make sure I'm not because this can do this can do colors also but for some reason it's just doing black right now Oh colors oh I see so on this is a single I was on single scan which is why it's just doing black if I want to do multiple colors I click here on colors and then I go down to four wall selected and hit update with you it looks like that'll look cool now I hit okay and now what it's doing is that just using four colors it's creating a version of this which is how you know you see this could be like a t-shirt print of this because it really only has four colors is it awesome and we can break out these colors now we can go ctrl shift G and now we can see we have our background color alright we can delete that if we want we can delete these ones here if we want to and we can see just these different parts so they're all kind of hooked to each other and there's I'll show you in the next video how to get rid of this down here because there's not really we could use like the erase tool I suppose and trying to erase it out but we don't we're not going to do that there's no a better way to do it yeah awesome tool isn't it pretty good pretty cool so let's come up here and let's go to we can do brightness steps and just kind of see what that looks like so brightener steps is gonna be similar to this to the brightness cutoff we've got we can do just graze and do like five different grays and update and see what it looks like in five different shades of grey or we can do three different shades of gray here three is a bit too little let's do six hit okay and now this is going to be the last one we actually have some reds but this time it's just all just Gray's so it'll look similarly to the other one maybe that's too many you could see the sky is two different shades but yeah play with this it's awesome and you can use it on vector art too if you bring in like a dirty like a small little like a fav icon like for my website and it has little pixelation it's kind of messy you can run this on it and kind of clean it up then you can scale it much larger if ever you have a tiny little tiny little thumbnail of a like a vector graphic let's see here so we just do one real quick if we find a little logo that's like too small these are all gonna be pretty good quality but sometimes you'll find a really small grainy logo that's just that you want to scale up massively and put it on a billboard well what you'll do is just run that trace and you don't have the source file for it if all you have is a teeny to little logo then you can bring it in here trace a bitmap on it and then scale it up much larger and you can clean up you know those little portions as well so that's the trace bitmap tool one of my very favorite tools of all time in Inkscape and it is super powerful especially if you want to do like t-shirt prints we're creating a kind of a print quickly based off of a real photograph so I hope you liked this video comment subscribe like below and let me know how you use this tool because I'm curious of other applications you can use it for I'm sure the sky is the limit appreciate your watching we'll catch you on the next video

Channel: TJ FREE

Views: 211,058

Rating: 4.9577165 out of 5

Keywords: svg editor, inkscape trace bitmap, free software, conver bitmap to svg, free illustrator, trace outline, adobe illustrator, trace an image, raster to svg, illustrator alternative, auto trace, convert to .svg, learn inkscape, raster to vector, drawing software, free download, inkscape tutorials, vector program

Id: E7HwLTQu2FI

Length: 9min 35sec (575 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 24 2018