Inkscape Trace Bitmap Tutorial: How to Convert PNG Image or Jpeg to Vector + Remove Background

i'm rick johansen and this is the iron echo design channel in this video we're gonna do an inkscape tutorial featuring the trace bitmap tool and i'll show you how to take a photo like this extract part of it creating a vector that you can then manipulate and do whatever your creative mind wants to do so the inspiration comes from two different comments in the comments section one comment was from kansas city that said love to see your take on murals and the other was asking for astronaut artwork so this this is my take this is an astronaut that is actually cleaning up the town so we'll go from let's actually give credit where credit is due the the base photo came from william real this was on creativecommons.org and i've got it linked in the description below if you want this exact photo you'll notice i did clean it up i took out some graffiti because it didn't know what it said didn't want to offend anybody all right so let's go over the tool if this is your first time using trace bitmap i'm going to show you on this example because it's very simple and works really well so i'll put this link in the description below too so you click on your image go to path trace bitmap over here in your sidebar you'll have the tracebit map menu you want to be on single scan brightness cut off so this is the default the way it comes with so yours should already have .45 for brightness threshold speckles smooth corners optimized all chosen with the options 2 1 and .20 so i've got it selected i'll click update you get a preview gives you an idea of what's going to happen then click apply and there you go so check this out so what brightness cutoff does is it takes the brightness and darkness and then creates a vector out of this so this file you can now use any way you want you can change the colors on it you can change the size it's going to scale perfectly so just to show you the power of inkscape this took about five seconds in the render and you're off to the races but what if it's too dark let's try it again with the 0.35 setting just to show you the difference update apply and you can see that you have a lighter version so sometimes you'll want to go lighter darker or you can composite pieces of both of them there's some other settings you can choose under single scan you can get edge detection auto trace but let's move on to multiple scans so i'm going to choose the nasa astronaut photo go to multiple scans and choose colors so for the number of scans we'll choose eight so that'll pull out eight different colors and the default has these unselected so let's choose smooth stack remove background update it'll give you the preview just like before and then do apply off camera it did take about 30 seconds but i was left with this which is now a vector version of the image which is good but not great let's try it again with more scans back to the source image here i'll have a link in the description below if you want to play with this one and two quick points one the source file itself was under one megabyte i got this from the nasa galleries so if you have a big source image a file is too large it'll either take a long time to process and render or it'll just crash so keep that in mind as you play with this two someone's gonna mention this there's people on the moon here so this is actually this is a training session that they've that they taped and took pictures of that's why there's a building here so this is actually training footage we're using so thank you for nasa for sharing and let's go to 18 scans now so everything's the same multiple scans color 18 update and then we'll click apply and here's what we got so this render took about a minute so i skipped over the processing part i will show you what we have so i'll double click and you can pull the different layers apart and that's what trace bitmap does with the multiple scans and i'll show you how you can actually extract one astronaut for the mural but i want it to just be like look like a stencil so to do that we're gonna go with another feature back to single scan so let's go back to our source image i'll click on this single scan now if i do brightness cut off just the way it is you see in the preview it's going to pull all the darkness well i want to pull the light i want to pull the white astronaut suit so instead i'll click on invert image and i tested this before at 0.50 under brightness cutoff invert image update this is what i want trace bitmap made the vector in black but with one change of color we can make it back to white now the question is how do i extract just this part of this new vector that we created so in inkscape it's not super intuitive but it's easy so let me show you so grab the bezier pen tool and as an example i'm just going to draw a random shape around part of my vector it doesn't matter the color doesn't matter the stroke the fill just something see-through so i can see where i'm going so i have opacity down and what you're going to do is go to the selector tool you have that new weird shape selected hold shift and collect your vector then go up to path intersection and there you go so now you have just that part so you're taking out the background of the vector to whatever you need i just reverted back to the full vector here so a trick is if you want to be more accurate with your clipping shape you can trace along the original and then just drag that over the vector and clip that part out so let's do it that way so i'm going to zoom in i have my bezier pen tool selected it doesn't matter the color doesn't matter the stroke color to start outlining the part that you want to take of your vector and if you're if you don't want to make a mistake you don't have to go fast and if you want to take a break just double click and you see how it's gonna it's gonna capture that little part of red to recontinue where you left off just hover over the end node and keep going so through the magic of editing i will finish this up off camera and then i'll show you how we stamp it out actually before we go if you want to be very precise you can go to edit paths by node and move any part that you want to get it just right so this will come in handy on a detailed part or if there's some feature you don't want to leave out all right there we go so we've got the whole thing selected but another question comes up i don't want to bring this interior part between the two hands so we need to make another clipping shape inside of this clip that out and then we can go do the extraction so it's same exact exercise just grab the bezier pen tool i'll just do it really quickly right here come down i've got it selected and so this is a shape on top of the shape so you see an opacity change here and the exact same exercise so i go to selector tool i have my interior shape hold shift grab the rest of the astronaut path difference and it comes right out zoom back out i'll take the clipping shape and put it over our white vector right about there i know my shape is selected i'll hold shift i'll click on the white vector then go to path intersection and there you go so let's go move it down into the mural a quick pause for full disclosure i did have to add this little shape right here to get more of the boot to show and i squared off this receptacle i think he was collecting practicing collecting moon rocks or something but for our mural it's going to be a dust pan so just let you know i did that so let's drag it onto the picture of the building so you can see it's a cool technique to pull out part of an image but i want to make it a little bit more realistic first of all i want to paint the building so we'll make this blue then we'll do one more trace bitmap to pull the shadows out of this building so it layers on top of the astronaut and finally we'll add a pop of color we'll make the sun visor a bright yellow so to paint the building i'm going to create a shape around it through the magic of editing here it is but i'm actually going to use this shape twice one to paint and then one to actually stamp out the shadows when we do trace bitmap so ctrl d will duplicate it let's save that for the shadows and for the paint let's go with let's take the stroke off of it and for the fill we'll go with some type of that blue we liked right about there looks good and if you've seen my other tutorials i'm kind of obsessed with the linear gradient so i'm going to go linear gradient which is these bars here if i click on the pencil i can edit the gradient and i think i'll have it go from full opacity and just almost have it like the sun's barely hitting the top there now i want to put the astronaut on top of the paint so i want to drop this down one step so these here are hierarchy if i go down one step then the astronaut comes up but i want to do the shadows now so let's go and click on the full picture go back to trace bitmap so path trace bitmap i'll do my single scan and we'll try maybe 0.54 for the brightness threshold update and apply let's see what we pulled out of here there it is let's pull this down because we have to stamp this out now we don't need to paint the building and i'll bring my shape over it okay and just like before the shape doesn't matter the color or anything like that i'm just going to clip it so i'll hold shift and get the vector we made from trace bitmap go to path intersection and here's our shadows now that's going to be too dark maybe we'll go to fill and stroke let's lighten this up somewhere in there should be okay let's put it back on top it needs to go up a couple steps one two okay now it's on top right there so it's subtle but now you have the shadow on top it's almost like the sun's hitting it you can see our mural and i want to make some type of visor work there so for that we'll go to good old bezier pen tool actually why go bezier when you can just do a circle so we'll try circle shift to control makes a nice round circle go to something more yellow or gold full opacity for now maybe not full opacity so we can see what we're doing all right so there's the visor ctrl d will duplicate it and i'm going to do another path modification so the top one shift get the bottom one go to path intersection let's drop it down a step so it goes behind maybe had a blur maybe blur the astronaut too [Music] that will do it there's our trace bitmap tutorial featuring an astronaut on a mural i hope this is helpful if you have any questions put a comment down below if you have any suggestions for future videos let me know and thanks

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 58,842

Keywords: Graphic Design, Inkscape, Affinity, Photoshop, Startup, Design, Tutorials, Tips, Logo, Trace Bitmap, Astronaut, Mural

Id: 3jHrdILxZws

Length: 10min 42sec (642 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 20 2021