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How To Auto-Trace using Inkscape - 4 Easy Steps

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Ok.  This is by no means, anything other than my own personal process I've developed.  I've learned my own way to do things.  Experiment.  Find a way that works for you, but I've noticed a bunch of requests and people asking how to do that, so I figured I'd post this.  If it's been done before, I apologize.  If anyone's interested in one done with Corel X3 - Please let me know and I'd be more than happy to do a quick one.  WOW, I can't wait to get another plotter...and get back into this.

This took approximately 5 minutes to do, start to finish.  This process works great on sillouhette style things.  I've also found if you are looking for something (say a character) and you google the item you're looking for with the words "Coloring Book" or "Drawing" after it, sometimes you can find HIGHLY traceable images to use. 

Couple pointers...

Step 1  - Pretty Straight Forward.  Remember, Garbage in, Garbage out.  Try using the best pic you can find

Step 2 -  Make sure the item you want to trace has the box around it like in the picture below or you're not going far :huh:

Step 3 -  After you hit OK to trace the image, my version, I have to manually close the box in this picture

Step 4 -  You can use node edit tool to figure out which is the jpg and which is your vector (if you can't find it, Press F2) after you  seperate the 2 images and when you click on it, you'll see the nodes.  Delete the JPG (the other one)

Next post will have the EPS that is the exact product before clean up, and the finished product (after cleanup in CorelX3)

Any questions, let me know :huh:

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yep.  You can google the item you're looking for with the word "clipart" and get more specific cliparts, but those cliparts generally trace well too!

Good stuff!  Forgot about clipart :huh: 

Microsoft Clipart generally vectorized already, but might need some clean up or layers removed.   You can actually copy it right from their site, and pasted it into X3 - Not sure about SB, but I assume so :huh:

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Great job any chance of you doing one for a multi color in inkscape?

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Thanks a lot for the advice.  Just a novice question here.  WHat constitutes a great picture?  WHat is the best pic?  Thanks! :huh:

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Thanks for the lesson. Being new to all of this it is always nice to find step by step how to do things. I still don't understand how you clean up or why you need to but I will find that in another thread I am sure. Thanks again for your post!

Christi

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Great job any chance of you doing one for a multi color in inkscape?

yes you can do full color. Just pick 'colors' when the box comes up. Be careful..However many passes you chose is how many colors you will have. It will pick up on variations and shades of the same color.

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Thanks for the lesson. Being new to all of this it is always nice to find step by step how to do things. I still don't understand how you clean up or why you need to but I will find that in another thread I am sure. Thanks again for your post!

Christi

Christi,

The clean up comes with the territory of doing an automatic trace.  The software interprets the edges of the image as it sees it and makes the best 'guess' as to where the lines should be.  It's up to you to go back over it with a fine toothed comb and clean it up some.  It may pick up on a shadow in the image, and put the line in an area it shouldn't be.

It's not perfect, nor is it meant to be a ONE CLICK and you're ready to cut kind of process.  It just simply gets you close...and in some cases closer than others, and in some cases not so close....  This is where practice editing nodes is of the Utmost Importance...

A good way to practice is to do a google image search for something like "Blues Clues Coloring Pages"  ((yeah, I got kids, could ya tell?)) and you'll come up with some easily traceable images....the more you do, the better you get at tracing and cleaning up...

http://images.google.com/images?complete=1&hl=en&q=blues+clues+coloring+page&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=1&ct=title

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sj_steve,

Thank you so much for helping explain that to me. I have been reading threw as many threads here as I can to learn everything I can, but sometimes you just don't understand why it is done. Thanks for making it more clear to me. I will goto those sites and practice.

Christi

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