Inkscape Trace Bitmap Tutorial: How to Convert Jpeg | PNG | Raster to Vector Image

[Music] i'm rick johansen and this is the iron echo design channel today we're going to do a beginner's inkscape tutorial specifically on one of my favorite features in inkscape the trace bitmap tool and this is a way you can take a jpeg or png file and convert it into a vector format so this is a couple examples i've done in the past here's a sailboat and you can extract the boat and then i added this like oval thing after the fact but here's another here's a great example of a locust that you can extract this vector file and then you can then scale this it won't pixelate you can use it in your projects it's just a good tool to have in your arsenal and i want to walk you through the steps on how to use it for the first time and how to modify it so you can get the outcome you want and today we will use this tiger as our example so let's go get the image i got it from this website pexels if you've never used it it's royalty free you can use this stuff on your projects open source files i chose this one you can choose any one you want but i chose one with the neutral background this black one will work too but for the simplest exercise a nice neutral white background with this tiger will work so i downloaded already and here we are back in inkscape so you can use the downloaded image just as is but because i have a screen recorder going i actually resized it to under 10 megabytes so just keep that as a frame of reference some computers if they have great processing power no problem but mine it seems to be i got to be under 10 megabytes to make it work correctly so here we go this is the tool select your image go to path trace bitmap let me get it so you can see it that's something i was working on all right so we'll start with let's walk you through it so trace bitmap single scan or multiple scans we'll get to multiple scans at the end that has like the highlight of the whole thing but for single scan brightness cut off the simplest way to explain it is it's going to look at this image and create its vector based on the brightness levels of the image itself so we don't need this b anymore i'll start with the 0.43 i think the presets like 0.45 so i have it on speckles smooth corner optimize this is all the defaults if it's not your default speckles 2 smooth corners 1 optimize 0.20 when you do update it'll give you a preview and then you push ok and then it'll think for a moment and there it is okay let's pull this out and that's pretty good pretty good for a first try and what this is is you got your vector file now but it's got too much darkness around the nose let's put this over on the 0.43 setting and we'll try again so as you can see you'll play with it until you get the settings where you want it and then you can use the image so we'll go back to single scan and i'll go to we'll try 0.35 on this one and then i'll do update just to get a preview i like that okay and that looks like it cleaned up the nose it did okay i would probably run with this one but i want to show you the full exercise so let's try it again click on the image and we'll change it for brightness threshold to 0.25 i have two decimal points 0.25 and then update that and let's see how this looks and that's going to be this might be actually useful all right so let's just compare them so 0.25 you have more contrast here it gets a little that's actually 0.35 is probably too dark what i would do if i was doing this and using this for a project i would take some of this and then some of this one and then composite them but for this tutorial let's just stick with the trace bitmap all right the next feature will go down here there's a if you're on your single scan you can have edge detection so this won't work too well with our tiger but i want to show you how it works so click on your image this is the same image i just duplicated it so we can go fast and then i'll go to brightness cut off edge detection then .65 might be intense we'll just go 0.50 right in the center update and it's going to get real busy you'll see what i mean okay let's see what we got here let's pull out the edge detection all right so that's pretty interesting so i would use this function more for like a still life or a car or some type of object because the algorithm is trying to find the detecting the edges and they're just too much it's too busy so it's a good feature for something else but let's move on to the next single scan feature which is auto trace which is very quick the settings i have here 2.0 for the error threshold but i want to change it to 5 for the filter iterations and if you update that it shows in color it's just going to stamp out like a real quick trace which would be okay let's see what we have here so we pull this out and that looks pretty good that took about like four seconds and i like this i do i have used this in the past if you saw the earlier tutorial we used auto trace for the lifeguard tower and in the case of the tiger i probably would still composite something from the brightness cut off but if it's like a building or again a car or something you can use auto trace pretty effectively and that brings us to the main event the multiple scans color scan so click on your image again we'll go to multiple scans and then under here we'll try colors now you can go as many each different scan is a different layer and it's going to isolate a different color of the image so in this case i have it at eight scans which would be a good baseline to start with the more scans you do the more layers the more time it'll take but eight will work pretty well some important features you want to click on smooth stack and in this case i do want to remove the background and you'll see what happens so oh the speckles 2 smooth corners 1.0 optimize 0.20 these are defaults i don't really mess with these update it might think for a second and then okay let's take a look at this that's pretty awesome so we have now a vector format from this this was a jpeg and look at the detail this is only eight scans for this tutorial i'm going to stop with this one but you can go 10 20. i've done up to 24 scans it just you got to save before you do that because it might crash but the more scans you do the more detail so i don't know if i would accept this part here but it does give you a really interesting way to make a vector out of a raster or a jpeg png file so to end off this tutorial i want to show you one other part this is the same thing i just did it twice you can then pull out you can isolate if you double click you can isolate the different colors so there's the black layer there is a gray layer there is the orange layer you just go you can it almost becomes art like a like a collage here of the different layers and maybe you like one of these for your project maybe maybe i just ruined it but anyway just play with the settings trace bitmap it's a great feature and have fun with it [Music] thanks

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 115,646

Keywords: Graphic Design, Inkscape, Affinity, Photoshop, Startup, Design, Tutorials, Tips, Logo, Trace Bitmap, Rick Johanson, Johanson, Vector, raster, tiger, pexels

Id: a8SAAJBo3yU

Length: 7min 10sec (430 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021