Inkscape Walkthrough - Vectorising a Difficult Logo

hey everybody c rogers here from the inkscape project today we've got a question from vicki about tracing a a logo that has gradients and tones that are almost the same in certain places which cause problems for the trace bitmap feature of inkscape and other svg conversion programs on the internet so uh yeah i'm going to show you how to take something like this and convert it to a vector let's get started we'll go and uh copy this image and we'll paste it into inkscape and the first thing i usually do is see what component parts i can pull out of this this logo because what we're going to do there's no algorithm currently available that i know of that will trace this gradient into a gradient it'll try and separate the colors into layers and you don't want that you just want a nice gradient so we're going to just take this shape entirely and apply a gradient after we have the shape to do that i normally just trace it using the default um features of um sorry the default settings of the trace bitmap function so if we go to path and trace bitmap the first thing i usually do is see how much of it will be will appear and that's what the update button is for it'll give you a little preview here of which shapes will be traced into vectors obviously it's not quite capturing enough of the light bits so we're going to turn up the brightness threshold it's pretty good maybe just a little bit more maybe like that much more yeah you'll see some pieces missing here but that doesn't necessarily mean that they'll be missing the most important thing is actually to identify the lightest uh color in your in your logo which is this blue up here and make sure that the preview has that and it does here so it's likely to work we'll just click apply and that looks pretty good actually you can send the the client a nice uh black and white version of their logo just with this so that's telling me that we've got most of the shapes that we need here um we're going to have to reconstruct a couple of these things like this circle on the outside um and uh this bit just to so we have a layer that maybe the client wants us to move this down a little bit or up or something else we want to be able to do that in the future so one of the things that we can do is just recreate those after the fact but this stuff is the stuff that's really going to take us a lot of time to redo and fortunately we don't have to because um the trace bit map has gotten these shapes for us but what we do need to do is break apart these pieces from the main shape because if we double click on this it'll show us that this is all one shape so the first thing we're going to do is break it apart we're going to select our our traced shape our path and we're going to go to path and um break apart yeah what that will do is it'll break out all of the interior shapes including all the pieces in the the text here into uh separate shapes they're all filled shapes though so that's why we can't really see what's going on um a little trick is to uh with everything still selected turn the opacity down to 20 percent and now you can see each of the component pieces they're all 20 percent so you can see how things are are layered so this 20 plus that is 20 is more of a darker gray and you can see this is like the third layer here of shapes are the darkest so we've got basically three layers of shapes to work with so that's kind of a handy little tip there to see what you're doing now what this did is if i double click on this you can see that our larger shape is in the front of everything else so we can't really click to select on anything we could hold the alt key down and uh click it will select the thing under this thing but the first thing that i'm really going to do is is move this to the bottom so it's not in our way so i'm going to go object and lower to bottom um that will let us select the second layer of shapes which is this but um notice i'm still having a problem selecting these bits here so i'm going to select all of the pieces uh that uh well okay yeah all of the pieces that are in front of other things um probably this one and this one and this one anything that contains smaller pieces are going to be in the front so i'm selecting those pieces and we're just going to bump them down we're going to object lower to bottom and then object lower to bottom again as well because lower to bottom is going to put them under our larger shape but now you can see we can select all the individual pieces without having to alt click to get under things yeah so that's another little tip for you there also um if you don't want to do that there's also x-ray select which is another little tip for you if you hold down the alt key and scroll your mouse wheel it will rotate through all of the pieces that are under the mouse cursor and then you can just stop and let go when you want to select the thing so if i want to select for example this background piece under the house i can hold down alt and hit the mouse wheel until it selects my shape and then let go of alt and now i've got my my house shape you can see so there are a couple little tips for you getting back to the shape here we want to um we're probably going to throw away most of these outside bits because again we're going to construct this circle or reconstruct this circle and we're going to pull out the text to remake this outline so the first thing we're going to do is uh is uh subtract this piece from this background piece here um actually now let's combine all of the uh the house pieces together and how we're going to or like all the slats and stuff because uh we're going to color this separately from the rest it's hard to tell here but this has a slightly darker gradient in the background so this is not this needs to be pulled out from the background um actually even easier than that why don't we just turn this piece white first of all so uh we'll turn this piece just white and then we'll turn up the opacity on it because um it's in the right place uh that'll make it white and we can then move it around um so when we recreate our circle it'll be part of that notice that we actually missed a little piece here so i'll select that piece shift selected so now i've got my house and this piece that also should be white we're just going to path and union those together great so yeah now we want all of the slats in the house actually let's get the boat first because it's a red color so we want to make that all one shape we're just going to shift click all of the pieces of our boat and yep i'm going to make sure that that yeah looks like we got all of it so we're going to path and union great now we can make that red there it goes i have the d key d is a dropper eyedropper right um and it's going to pick up that color note it's still 20 so let's go ahead and make that 100 great i'm going to choose our select tool here and now that we've got our boat all as one we can actually just select everything down to here and this will get all of our interior pieces for our house and we'll go ahead and move that just to make sure yep got all the pieces and then we're going to path union those again [Music] and uh we could put a gradient on that but we're going to wait on that because as you can see we've got these bits here these are going to be a little bit of a problem for us um nothing major though as you'll find out later uh we will take the um text next so we'll just select our text oh looks like i got a piece of the border here so i'm gonna hold down shift and click that piece again and it will deselect it now we'll go to path and now if i say union here it's going to combine all these interior shapes into the text and that's not what we want so i'm going to undo that with ctrl z select those instead remember we broke this apart right break apart is how we got all these pieces to be separate so we're going to undo that process and what that will do is it will recombine these letters into shapes with holes in them like they should be so we're going to combine right yep so we've got our text here we're gonna make that 100 and turn it white because our text over here is white great so um regarding our circles and this bit right here i'm just going to get rid of them entirely i'm going to erase them uh right off of the map here um actually maybe uh instead of white you know what here um here's another trick so inkscape by default uh will make your transparent background white but if you're dealing with a lot of white shapes and you don't want to keep changing colors or putting a shape with gray behind it to try and see your shapes one thing that you can do is go to document properties and down at the very bottom here you can see that there is checker background you can click that and it will actually make your your background checkered but you can actually do it one better than that you can click on the background color and it's still kind of hard to see that so i'm just going to make it a little bit more gray and this won't affect the export at all of the as long as this value is zero it's not going to show up in your export so that that's good i'll just say okay i'll x that out and now we can see what we're doing here a lot better thank you document properties yeah so um probably the easiest way to do this is just to make a circle i know big shocker make a circle to make a circle um a little trick if you hold down ctrl and shift uh it will expand out from the center it kind of helps you make a little bit better of a circle estimate so i can line this up right in the middle here if you hold the alt key and use your key the up or up down left right arrow keys on your keyboard you can adjust that a little bit just so it's right in the middle and then i'm going to hold ctrl shift again to expand from the center just so i can get in pretty close to the original size i think that's probably close enough okay so we got that circle there um now i'm just gonna edit copy the circle and edit paste in place that's going to paste another copy directly on top of this one i'm going to change the fill to i'm sorry the stroke to red so we're going to go stroke style okay we've got some stroke width and just make it a flat color choose red and we'll up our thickness to about the thickness of the line that we're aiming for and then i'm just going to click the x here to make the fill as none so when i expand this again ctrl shift to expand out from the center and make sure that it is about the right size great so now i've got a circle representing the outer circle and a circle representing the inner circle and to make our circle look more like this i'm going to click the inner circle and click the the gradient here and we're going to go from the top of this to the bottom if you hold the control key it will lock to a vertical gradient or to specific angles so we're just going to take this from the top to the bottom i'm going to click the top node here and click the eyedropper and get our teal color here and the same thing i'm going to click the bottom one and click the bottom so we've got this nice gradient that goes from one to the other although you'll notice that there's kind of this blue in between which tells me that this is not a one color to a one color gradient there's something in here they wanted more of a saturated blue in here so we're going to go to our gradient tool again and we're going to add a stop these little handles are called stops in your gradient we're going to add a stop right here by double clicking right in the middle so you can see it added a stop to it then we're going to take our eyedropper and go right in the middle to write about where that is and boom ah so much better yeah so that looks pretty good now all we have to do is move this back object lower to bottom right don't worry too much about alignment we're going to adjust that later here but just to kind of make it i'm just going to eyeball it right now yep and of course we can go to our barn boat barn here and add a red stroke which will make our outline so double click stroke or actually i think single somebody told me single click works as well so single click stroke and uh give it us a a flat color and we're going to use our eyedropper to get this color so if i use the eyedropper now it will change the fill of this to red which is not what i want right but on another little trick if you if you hold the shift key you can see like on the cursor how it switches from filled to outline just shift-click that and you've got your red outline we'll make it a little bit thicker you can see it's starting to make it thicker so something is happening here you notice that it's kind of uh it's kind of going from the uh the midpoint here and encroaching on our letter forms what we really want is for it just to be an outline so we want to put the stroke underneath the fill and that's what these buttons are for so under stroke style you've got um the order and uh one of them here you can see the fill is on on top is like stroke markers fill um so if you click one where the actual stroke is on top it's going to put the stroke the fill on top of the stroke so it's going to draw the stroke first and then um on top it's going to put the markers and then the fill there are no markers in this by the way that's kind of outside the scope of this tutorial but yeah so that's how to make that work and it looks like it's a little bit thicker than this so we'll we'll bump that up just a little bit more and we'll pretend like that's okay for now oh yeah also if you haven't done already save your work it'd be a shame to go through all this work and then uh you know try to uh redo it again if if something goes wrong so um make sure you're saving a as an escape svg file we're just going to call it what is this logo svg doesn't have to be all caps by the way caps attack boat logo um right so now that we've got that safely saved ah dot svg.svg okay that's a bug um yeah so all right we've got this uh looks like we've got most of the thing of the component parts here traced um so we'll go to our uh our document properties and we'll change our background back to white we'll just get rid of that and change this back to white and now we are going to deal with the gradient inside this house um really this isn't doing much for this logo just uh that's my personal opinion about this logo is uh this bit is very hard to see especially when you zoom out like you can barely see the top of that bit it actually just makes it look a little bit more cluttered so i'm not going to worry too much about those strokes if you want to you can i'll go over quickly how how to get something like that in there in the end but really what we want to do is take these interior bits and get that gradient it might even look better as the same gradient as this gradient here if you want to do that if you just want to copy this gradient you can edit copy select your shape that you want to apply the same gradient to and edit paste style and you can see it pastes the same gradient here um it's a little bit darker i wonder why it's so dark let's have a look so to look at the gradient handles for this you just go to your gradient tool it'll show you where the handles are where okay it thinks the handles are over here that's one of the problems so we're just going to move this down here and there to about where our other one was yep okay so already that's looking pretty good and i would argue that it actually looks a little bit better like this um i don't again i don't think that these are adding too much to the the logo itself if you zoom out they look pretty much the same except for this thing has a uh i don't know a barrel or something behind it so um let's make that barrel real quick we'll assume that the client likes it and we want to keep it so i i'll usually just start with a uh just a regular old rectangle here uh we'll make it black to begin with and actually let's make it red so we can see what we're doing so if we make it red and we'll make it uh maybe like 20 percent uh maybe maybe 40 transparent so make sure to get that uh arc exactly the way that it is um yep so now to to be able to adjust this line we're going to need to convert this to a path first so obj this rectangle to a path so we're going to do object to path that'll give us access to drag this and we're just going to drag this over to where the shape ends and that's about as much as there is to i can see there's a little bit of a discrepancy here so i'm going to shift select both of these and then use my arrow keys on the keyboard with alt alt is a precision so if you hold down alt and hit the down arrow key you can see it just nudges up a little bit and okay that looks pretty good now we'll just adjust this curve slightly and this one's slightly here maybe this is more precision than you really need but you know sometimes it matters in this case i don't think it does but there's that precision for you if you need it okay so we've got that piece now we will take it and move it over here behind our boat barn text this is where i like to start using hotkeys because i really want to move this down beneath our text but i don't want to have to keep going to the object menu here which i can never remember where these are anyway mainly because i use the hot keys mostly so lower is page down so we're going to remember page down here from now on so um just to practice we'll go page down page down and page up will take it up through the hierarchy again you can see very nice and i think it goes over our yes over our waves so that's good now we'll change our opacity to 100 uh we're going to take this gradient here we're going to reconstruct this gradient so the first thing i'm going to do is move this down so that it's about the same height as in the same position as our other one just to make getting that gradient a little bit easier again we're going to click on gradient and we're going to drag down from the top to the bottom hold down control to lock it into the vertical position and then we're going to click on our eyedropper tool select the oh that's the bottom so we've got this one highlighted that uh so we'll get this one and the top probably black to black but never know this should be at least accurate uh now we're going to go and take the gradient double click to add a stop to the middle and click our eyedropper tool again and assign that that looks pretty close you'll notice here though that um there's actually a little bit more blue in the middle um so what you can do is actually just add another stop uh another blue stop so going back to the gradient tool i'm going to add just another one here and we're going to grab that blue again just so we have there you go a little bit more blue um it also doesn't quite expand out to this distance so um yeah if you click on your gradient tool again to edit these just take this one down a little bit and this one up a little bit and it'll start to squish that gradient down a bit more like it was here which you can see is looking a lot better well a lot more like this one yep and um that's pretty much it for how to re-vectorize this before you send this to a client i recommend turning all of your strokes to outlines one reason is because based on the software that is rendering this it might not actually render your stroke behind this inkscape is capable of doing that but some software doesn't work correctly with it so uh you'll wind up with a pdf or something that has uh something that looks like this instead which is not what you want right so just to make sure that that doesn't happen we're going to click this and path stroke to path what that's going to do is make your fill and your stroke two separate pieces and it's going to group them together so you can see it's now a group of two objects now you can path and ungroup these sorry object and ungroup these or ctrl shift g which is what i usually use um to see the difference you can see there's this shape on top of that shape now um yeah you could go one step further and subtract this shape from the shapes under it but to be honest i wouldn't bother it's not that big of a deal and also depending on the software again if you subtract this from this and there isn't any overlap it will sometimes show just a little bit of your background color between those two um so i i think that's fine overlapping that is fine um yep so now you've got your logo retraced with all the component pieces um you could stop here which i would do i'd send it back to them and see if this is cool with them uh or you could uh i go the extra mile and do these um the outside bits of this of this house here but you'll notice that it doesn't even continue along the entirety of the house so it's a little bit inconsistent in the first place um but if i were to do that what i would do is take our our white house shape remember this one uh we're going to edit copy this and we're going to edit paste in place um and we're going to move it up using page up so that it's on top of things so we can see what we're doing we're going to take the opacity down to 20 percent which won't have much of an effect until we expand this so what i'm going to do is uh use the outline of this to expand you could also use offset so you could do this you could go object um is it object ctrl shift j that's the uh maybe it's path yes okay sorry control j is dynamic offset right so that'll give you this little handle which you can pull out and in this case it works okay sometimes it's a little bit fiddly but in this case it seems to work pretty well so we're going to look at the thickness of this outline and that looks about right we're going to have to get rid of these other other ones here although i would argue that if you're going to outline this for consistency you should probably outline the rest of it as well just because it's going to look a little bit better a little bit more complete but for the sake of this we're just going to do what they did we're going to assume that they like it as it is um and uh yep so once we have this uh we're going to apply this it's just a shape a fill without a stroke so we're going to go pat path and object to path to make it a path now that we have it as a path we can cut off the bits that we don't want see where does it go down to it goes down to here and [Music] looks like it cuts off right about here okay so yeah we'll just take this and we'll cut it off here um oh note that i have my node snapping on so this is nice because then i can just get it to where that particular point is and since i'm going to cut off all the rest of this i'm just going to yeah there we go so i just want to cut all that off of this shape to do that you need to select the shape is that it yeah that looks like it okay and path difference there you go and you got your outline um but actually this is a shape so if we turn this red you can see it's actually just a shape what we really want is this to um to be cut from our house shape as well so to do that we're going to move this down again with page down or object lower and we're just going to make sure that it's under the white of the house we're going to use the that trick with alt we're going to hold down alt and use the mouse wheel until we can get our white bit which is this one and we're going to copy this because using it to cut the thing underneath it is going to make it disappear we want it back eventually so then we're going to shift select the top of the house and path difference okay so you can see that did exactly what we wanted it to we wanted it to make the outline of our house there so excellent next thing we'll do is edit paste in place right so we've got our house back and um if this is um in new inkscape it will keep track of where you have copied it from the layers uh this is a new change by the way in 1.1 the upcoming release which i'm using right now um but if it comes up on top just hit the page down button a couple of times so if it comes up like this just hit page down again until it looks the way you want it to and as a last step we're going to make it that uh teal color this slightly darker teal color um so yeah i'm gonna select our house outline here make it 100 percent opaque and then use our eyedropper tool to sample and it looks like it looks like they used a gradient on that bit too so you can see that um as it goes up it gets lighter and darker down that means that this is actually a gradient so what do we do with a gradient again we just click the gradient tool i'm gonna take this bit and move it up to the top of the house again holding control and at the bottom here we're just going to sample this bit here there we go and at the very top we're going to sample the very top all right there you go and um that in a nutshell is how to trace a complex logo i know um some of you are probably wanting a one button solution but uh this is as a professional logo reconstruct this is how you would do it typically you don't want to to trace a gradient it'll just ruin your day and ruin ruinographic fortunately this one was high enough resolution to get all of the the pieces uh fairly accurately so it was an easier job for us um so yeah i hope you enjoyed this uh tutorial and um i'll see you for the next one have a good day

Channel: Freedom Designed

Views: 64

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Id: unXaEQNig_k

Length: 35min 54sec (2154 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021