Inkscape Trace Bitmap Tutorial: Multiple Color Scans | Watercolor Effect | Spray Tool Clone vs. Copy

i'm rick johansen and this is the iron echo design channel in this tutorial i want to do a deeper dive into the trace bitmap feature of inkscape if you followed along we've done trace bitmap but we haven't looked at the multiple scans specifically the color scans so we'll go with a jpeg or a png image and i'll show you how to extract this type of color vector file then we'll drop in an easy to do watercolor background and for detail for artistic touch we'll pop in some paint splatter bubbles using the spray tool i want to show you the clones and copy and the difference between the two all right so let's begin so first we need our source image this came from pexels.com this is an open source platform and to give credit where credit is due this is from shavanan photography it's called close up of a siamese fighting fish so here's the file full disclosure i did change the file size to under three megabytes inkscape has a tendency to crash when it's doing too much computing power at once and my computer is not fast enough to handle the big files if you experience slowness or crashing then try that try to resize the file if you need help learning how to do that just pop a comment below and i'll help you out there so let's go over before we can run we get a walk so where is trace bitmap go up to path trace bitmap and you'll see a tab comes up on the sidebar menu the default settings are single scan brightness cut off with a threshold of 0.45 so what does that mean so it's going to take the image and depending on the lightness and darkness it'll take out a vector file based on the threshold so 0.45 just make sure you have speckles smooth corners and optimize these are all the default settings let's go to update it gives you a preview apply and you get nothing just looks like junk this means the baseline threshold is not what we want let's try .67 click on the image apply that's a little better let's go to 0.75 and you get that so to answer a question from a comment in a previous video let's say this .75 is too dark and the first one was way too light you can keep playing with the thresholds or you can clip out parts that you want i like the tail here maybe the detail in the eye up here and the body and you can take those different clips and combine them into one composite image if you want help with that let me know but let's move on to the main event let's bring down the fish here we go the only difference will be instead of single scan click over to multiple scans i want to start with brightness steps because it might be a design solution that you'll find useful i have it selected the only difference will be for default let's choose smooth stack and remove background so image is selected apply what do we have here we have a new vector file based on the source image that was made by doing eight scans of the brightness step but we want to go with color for this project i will move this aside click back on the image and still under multiple scans this time choose colors smooth stack remove background all chosen as an example we'll start with eight scans update gives you a preview apply let's take a look at this so here we have the eight color scans and to show you you can click off of everything and then double click on it and you can grab different layers so here's the red layer let's take out the dark purple layer and you see this might work for you if you have a project you want a stylized version of the fish you can go with that but i want to make something with more fine detail so let's go down to another version this is the same file just duplicated and i'll change the color scans to 20 apply my inkscape thought for about 20 seconds and produced this so here we go this is the color vector we made just like before this time i'm going to double click on this baby blue background part and delete that add a habit i'm going to group all these layers so i'm going to click in no man's land around everything that selects all the different 19 layers i took out one i'll do ctrl g which groups it all together so i can move it all in unison now i do notice that i have some transparency it's missing part of the body and part of the head i think that looks good for this project but if you don't like that an easy fix is choose the bezier pen tool draw yourself a shape that will cover the problem area slide it in place go up to your top menu if you're on the selector these are the hierarchy steps drop it down to the bottom and you've got it cleaned up a little bit just make sure to regroup that now i don't want that there so we'll say goodbye to that and let's move to some open space for the watercolor background if you've played along with my other videos you know i love the watercolor effect i think it looks good adds an organic feeling but it's quirky so i'll give you a quick refresher here let's choose the create circles and ellipses tool i'm gonna do just an oval and it doesn't matter the shape it does matter the color for some reason i've noticed the richer darker full opacity colors work better so if you're just trying watercolor out go with like a dark purple or a blue the way it works is we're going to take this shape this color go to my fill and stroke menu so i'm on this oranges color full opacity go to filters texture watercolor and as you can see if this is the first time you're trying it it looks bad it didn't really do what we wanted it to do and that's okay the number one way to manipulate your watercolor effect is with the blur so if i take the blur all the way off you can see there's my oval see the outline of the oval and inkscape is using that square as the texture that it's applying to the oval so somewhere in this version up at 66 blur is where i get the effect that i'm looking for let me go one step further to show you a couple more ways to make it look the way you want see that x in the middle if you grab the x you can then move it around and it changes the watercolor like so this just inkscape doing math creating this cool organic fluid effect when you get it where you like it let's say right here where there's some extra bleeding click off of it click all the way off of it choose your selector tool now i don't know if this is something official in the inkscape manual but when i resize my image then i can move it without it disrupting the effect and it won't matter if i scale it let's zoom back out to our fish let's scale it much larger and it still retains the bleed the way i wanted it i'm going to turn it on its side so you see these like arrows i'll choose one rotation there let's see what that's going to look like need it bigger than that let's scale it up some more i think that's all right let's drop it to the bottom and we can reposition the fish so it just peeks out the top of the watercolor time to learn the spray can tool and what it can do for you so down here spray can spray objects by sculpting or painting click there on mode we're going to cover the first three settings spray copies spray clones or spray objects in a single path spray can is going to spray whatever object you have selected so i'll get my selector tool and i'll choose this triangle i've arbitrarily called it copy and for settings these are just the settings that'll work well for our purposes here depending on what you want to do with the spray can you'll be changing them but let me go over them so with 5 amount 30 that's the rough amount of how many objects will be sprayed out every time you click rotation will be important on this project so i have it at 50 percent scale 50 scatter 50 and focus 50. we're going to spray this triangle here and we're set to spray copies i'll hold the left mouse button down and draw a line it sprays out copies it's got some rotation some scaling looking good let's choose now the pink triangle spray can but we'll do spray clones left mouse button what is the difference we'll get to that so now we'll choose the single path spray can and single path is this mode right here and again you really can't tell the difference until you revisit them so on copy i can choose any of these and they are independent of each other no big deal but clone this was sprayed as cloned copies which means if i change the original they all change i can change the color they all change this is very powerful and we're going to use it in our project so what's up with single path well that's good because unlike copies they're all independent this is all one thing you could do similar features as clone by changing them all at once but it doesn't scale thank you unsung hero spray can tool now let's put you to work knowing what we now know the spray can will spray anything we choose for an object i pre-made these objects that we're going to spray but to show you how easy it is you just grab the circle tool draw out a circle ctrl d we'll duplicate it make that smaller grab them all path union and we'll change the color to that pink there you go we've got our bubble slash paint splatter but it's way too big so if you zoom in you can see that is the scale i want to spray if you hold shift and control together when you resize it'll stay uniform maybe right there we'll see when we get there i'm going to clone it so i can always change it so i know it's selected go to spray can tool this middle one here is clones and let's just start shooting it around okay i just sprayed it around the perimeter of the fish and to show you the clone feature if i want to change the color with the original clone selected just change the color a little bit too much like blood on that so let's go back to wherever it was right there pink i'm going to do another pass but let's change the original clone just duplicated it get the opacity out of there let's go with the full white so it is selected go back to spray can i'm on clones let's see what this looks like i can't tell if it looks like bubbles or paint either way that's the effect i'm going for let's do one more but i'll do a single path to show you how that could come in handy i've got a smaller version of this black dot selected as my object i'll do spray can spray objects in a single path for the mode let's add some contrast down here to show you how it works if you grab any one of the dots you just sprayed out they move as one single path so you can take them all together without grouping them and with that will wrap up this tutorial off camera i did drop in this weird shape here to be like bubbles underneath everything just to round out the composition there hopefully this was helpful if you have questions or ideas for future tutorials let me know in the comments and thanks [Music] you

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 1,986

Keywords: Rick Johanson, Inkscape, Trace Bitmap, Watercolor, Bezier Pen

Id: F7yBbUcSRU8

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021