The Complete Guide To Using Trace Bitmap in Inkscape

[Music] this is nick with logosbynic.com and in this tutorial i'll be demonstrating how you can use the trace bitmap feature located in inkscape and what trace bitmap does is it allows you to create a vector tracing of a photograph using an automated algorithm instead of having to trace it manually using the bezier pen and other tools okay now the benefit of using trace bitmap is that it saves you a lot of time it creates a really quick tracing of any photograph you have the downside of using it though is that it doesn't always work with every photo based on the composition of your photo sometimes it produces some sloppy results so you're never going to get a 100 accurate tracing of your photograph unless you trace it manually but the downside of tracing it manually is that it takes a lot of time and a little bit of expertise as well so the method you should use depends on the image you're working with and what it is you're trying to achieve if you're just trying to create a quick sloppy automated vector tracing of your photo trace bitmap is great for that so let me show you how to go about doing that i have these two example photos here i'm going to work with this one first i'm going to come over here to where it says path i'm going to click on trace bitmap now if you notice up here we have three different tabs trace bitmap pixel art and help for this tutorial i'm going to focus on trace bitmap pixel art would be a separate tutorial altogether so let's focus on trace bitmap for now if you notice in here we have two different options we have single scan and we have multiple scans and the difference between the two of them basically is one is for black and white one is for color so single scan would create a single vector object it would trace a single vector object over your photo in one single color so it would be good for creating things like silhouettes or maybe even creating vector textures whereas multiple scans would be good for creating uh vector tracings of photos that have a lot of color and you want to retain some of that color so let me demonstrate how each works i'm going to choose single scan for this image because this is a black and white image and i just want to create like a like a silhouette sort of tracing this now if you look at this drop down over here we have a lot of different options and these options all what these options do is they basically trace your image using a different sort of algorithm and the one that you should use depends on the composition of the image you're working with because every image is different okay so when you're tracing a bitmap you're going to want to cycle through these different options and update the preview to see how it looks to find out which one is best for your photo so for this one i'm just going to leave the cut the brightness cut off i'm going to click update and it shows you a preview here of the vector tracing that's going to be made from the image okay that looks pretty good i like how that looks i'm going to click ok to create the tracing and if you notice it created a vector tracing over the photo now this here is a true vector object you can change the color of that you can perform path operations on that you can do everything that you would normally do with the vector object with this right here let me turn off snapping now let me get rid of that let me show you some of these other options here just to show you what i mean if you come down here to like something like edge detection and you click update you'll notice it doesn't really trace anything in the image there's some speckles caught in the uh in the tracing there but it's not really what i'm going for so for this sort of image edge detection wouldn't be good but maybe for a different type of image edge detection would work perfectly so really like i said it depends on the image you're working with so whenever you're trying to trace vectors using this tool make sure to cycle through these and see which one gives you the best result okay see this right here as an example if i click ok we end up with a pretty sloppy tracing this tracing right here it's also got a lot of nodes in it this is a really complicated tracing so uh one thing i'd like to warn you about when using this tool is to be very careful about making complicated tracings like this now my computer was able to handle this because i have a pretty powerful computer but if you're using like your your average consumer grade computer this would probably lock up inkscape and cause you to have to restart the application so always be careful when you're creating traces that you're not creating something too complicated okay so let me show you now if you go to uh any of these options here brightness cutoff you have some settings that you can tweak over here the brightness threshold let me update this right now by default it's at 0.450 if i change that to something like point eight and click update it you can see it changes the tracing it changes the algorithm of the tracing there there's more of the shadows being caught up in the tracing there so this is just one of those things that gives you more granular control over your tracing so when you're tracing an image just cycle through these different settings see which one works best and then you can alter these settings a little bit to see to really fine-tune your tracing now this looked a lot better before at 0.45 so i'm going to put that back to what it was and click update and then over here we have invert image if you click on that and you click update you can see it creates an inverted tracing if i click ok to create that tracing it pretty much creates a vector tracing of the negative space and the subject it creates a vector tracing of the negative space of the image and the subject becomes the negative space of the tracing as you can see there okay so that's another thing you might want to pay attention to whenever you're tracing an image so let me undo that let me show you now how to trace images with color if i select this image right here i'm going to click on multiple scans now because i'm working with color and again we have all of these different options we can cycle through i'm going to choose colors for this one i'm going to click update and it's showing you how the vector tracing would look in color i'm going to click ok to generate that and as you can see here let me zoom in on this if you zoom out it looks photorealistic but if you zoom in you can see that this is indeed a vector tracing and now the flaws in using auto tracing become a little more apparent because you can see there's a lot of imperfections in here there's a lot of speckling and a lot of details that got included in there that probably shouldn't have been but like i said with an auto tracing you can't expect it to be perfect it's never going to be exact okay so let me come back over here this image over here we have the number of scans scans pretty much represent the number of colors in an image okay so with this tracing i created eight scans meaning it's gonna use eight different colors okay now if i decrease that to like maybe something like three and click update it's only going to use three colors okay as you can see there and inversely if i increase it from eight to maybe something like 16 it includes more of the colors and if you click ok you end up with a bigger tracing with a lot of different options but at the same time it looks a little more photorealistic and just to show you that this is indeed a vector tracing i'm going to ungroup this i'm going to go to object ungroup and it's going to ungroup it into lots of different little parts here and you could zoom in and you could take these parts and change them and do whatever you want with them okay then finally if you click on this image up here you'll notice there's a remove background setting now if you enable that it's going to remove the white background from this image here the problem with using this though is it it only works on images where the background is really defined this image is a great example because the background is white so if the software will have no problem determining where the background is located on more complex images it's just going to exclude areas of the image that it thinks is the background even if it's not exactly accurate so let me just show you how that looks i'm going to click update i'm just going to click ok and it created a vector tracing minus the background i'm going to place it over this object here so you can see okay now you get an idea i've removed the background now some of it some of it got wrong like you see here there's a little bit of negative space in there showing through the image beneath it is showing through there so it removes some of that as well but that's okay because that's easy to fill in otherwise but that's how that part works and then finally down here we have some settings that you can play with if if you've cycled through these options and you've played with these adjustments and you still can't get it quite right you can adjust these as well we down here we have speckles this says ignore small spots in the in the bitmap the idea behind this is that it eliminates some of this fragmentation in here some of these speckles but as you can see it's not always perfect maybe if i were to increase this a little bit maybe it would do a little better job but i'm not going to play with that for now over here smooth corners that's enabled by default whenever you create a vector tracing at something usually you end up with sharp corners in your image they end up smooth when you trace them okay so uh that's enabled by default and then over here optimize try to optimize paths by joining a paste adjacent bezier curve segments the idea behind that is that whenever you create a vector tracing of an image you're creating a really complex uh vector object with a lot of nodes in it let me show you as an example here i'm going to trace this image i'm going to click on this as you can see my computer is struggling with this a little bit i'm going to click on update i'll click ok now i may regret trying this but i'm going to give it a try anyway i'm going to select this vector object and i'm going to come over here to the edit paths by nodes tool okay now if you notice this image i mean this this vector object is made up of hundreds maybe even thousands of little nodes here okay now when you create a vector object with lots of nodes like that um sometimes it'll lock up your computer the idea behind optimize is that if you increase this threshold it'll create less of those nodes okay so that's pretty useful in creating a vector tracing that you can actually work with without a crash in your system but the downside is with less nodes it may not be as accurate as a tracing so i think that should do it for this tutorial that is how you can go about uh creating vector tracings of photographs using inkscape if you have any questions leave a comment below and as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 52,570

Rating: 4.9532166 out of 5

Keywords: trace bitmap in inkscape, logos by nick, logosbynick, nick saporito

Id: aVPV6AtjGBg

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021