Inscape Photo to Outline Design

[CNC_rowdy]

Hi All, I am very new to Inkscape and have a question. Say I have pictures of my dogs and I would just like the picture outlines of them. With maybe a few of the inner features like the eyes, nose and mouth outlines. I know how to go to path, trace bitmap etc... Maybe someone here could post a step by step process of this. The only other program I have is the standard windows paint. (I see no help there). I am no good at hand tracing. Is there a way to take the "path, trace to path black and white image" and come up with some sort of outline picture? If someone could get me going with a step by step process I would really appreciate.
Thanks,
CNC_rowdy

[plasmanewbie]

I know that David aka adbuch has posted some step by steps of this in this Inkscape forum. I think if you were to browse through some of the topics here you would find them. I have learned a lot of Inkscape from David's tutorials.

[CNC_rowdy]

Thanks plasmanewbi,
I will search.
CNC_rowdy

[adbuch]

Hi All, I am very new to Inkscape and have a question. Say I have pictures of my dogs and I would just like the picture outlines of them. With maybe a few of the inner features like the eyes, nose and mouth outlines. I know how to go to path, trace bitmap etc... Maybe someone here could post a step by step process of this. The only other program I have is the standard windows paint. (I see no help there). I am no good at hand tracing. Is there a way to take the "path, trace to path black and white image" and come up with some sort of outline picture? If someone could get me going with a step by step process I would really appreciate.
Thanks,
CNC_rowdy

Post a sample image of your dog that you wish to auto trace with Inkscape so we can see exactly what you are working with.
Thanks,
David

[CNC_rowdy]

Yes David, thank you for you reply. Let me find the good photo of one of my dogs and I will try and upload it by this weekend.
Thanks again,
CNC_rowdy

[CNC_rowdy]

David, here is a picture of my dog, maybe you can get me going in the right direction making outlines from a photo in Inkscape. I am a new one to Inkscape, and I cant even trace an image by hand. Thank you for spending your time to look as this.

0.jpg (70.98 KiB) Viewed 4366 times

0.jpg (70.98 KiB) Viewed 4366 times

[tcaudle]

What you find is the dirty little secret of Auto trace , not only in Inkscape but in any program. The more complex and less hard edges in a photo has the more challenge it is for using auto trace. Most of the demos you see they trace art that is already high contrast and solid lines . Also resolution has a lot to do with it. You want to trace (auto or by hand) as high a DPI picture as you can to be able to have less jagged edges .

In this case you can try editing first with a bitmap program and try to dropout all of the background "noise" or you may find it faster and you get better results to simply hand trace the things you want with the PEN tool in Inkscape. Go along the edges with the Bezier tool and set pints , Dont try ot follow all of the detail and curves. Once you have a complete object (closed) then you use the node tiil and drag the lines between nodes to match the edges, You and add more nodes or delete nodes . You can drag them and then drag the curves , Once you figure out how to use the tools it gets a lot faster and you can also come out with shapes that cut in plasma . You can use the PATH and UNION to weld closed objects to each other

When you hand trace you can select what you want to make into objects and ignore things that will confuse the end shapes. A good example is his mouth and teeth and how you wan that to cut out of metal. Either way you are going to spend a lot of time either cleaning up the auto trace or simply doing it by hand..

[adbuch]

I agree with Tom on this one. I did spend a little bit of time trying different auto traces with Inkscape, but the results were not acceptable. I do expect there are some good Youtube videos about learning how to do artistic manual tracing - or maybe a combination of auto trace with manual cleanup. Here is one that I found.

David

[robertspark]

cnc_rowdy

you probably wish to post a better quantity image first as that is only 70kb

try to zip it as a high resolution image and it may be possible to use filters an ai to remove the background and just leave the dog...

[CNC_rowdy]

Yes, thanks to all, I will look into this. Thanks again.
CNC_rowdy

[ben de lappe]

Aye, that 'dirty little secret' tcaudle mentioned is why I hand trace every file I work. There are however things one can do to make an image easier to work with. In this example I've used CorelDraw to resample the image to a higher resolution and larger size while also removing the background. As a CNC guy I'm a total noob with the photo/paint side so I'm sure a pro could do much better. At least with this image I wouldn't get the dreaded low res headache.

[robertspark]

nice Ben, didn't know you could upscale the resolution without pixelation

[CNC_rowdy]

Ben, that looks real good. one day, I will try and trace this photo.
Thanks,
Timbo

[adbuch]

Ben, that looks real good. one day, I will try and trace this photo.
Thanks,
Timbo

Timbo - I agree! Nice work by Ben. Perhaps Ben will create a short tutorial with a few screen shots to show exactly how he did this.

David

[adbuch]

Aye, that 'dirty little secret' tcaudle mentioned is why I hand trace every file I work. There are however things one can do to make an image easier to work with. In this example I've used CorelDraw to resample the image to a higher resolution and larger size while also removing the background. As a CNC guy I'm a total noob with the photo/paint side so I'm sure a pro could do much better. At least with this image I wouldn't get the dreaded low res headache.

Nice work Ben! How about creating a short tutorial with a few screen shots to show us exactly how you did this.
Thanks,
David

[ben de lappe]

nice Ben, didn't know you could upscale the resolution without pixelation

Thanks Robert! Until a few days ago neither did I. The tutorial I watched utilized this feature for printing on tiles to cover a wall with a large design, which again I didn't know was a thing. Also of note I could have gone higher with the resolution but didn't want to upload something massive here.

[ben de lappe]

Ben, that looks real good. one day, I will try and trace this photo.
Thanks,
Timbo

No problem Timbo and you're quite welcome.

[ben de lappe]

Nice work Ben! How about creating a short tutorial with a few screen shots to show us exactly how you did this.
Thanks,
David
[/quote]
Thanks David and will do!

[tcaudle]

Typical way in most bitmap programs is to create a mask around the object you want to keep and then reverse it sop iit everything outside the mask and you use the FILL tool to fill with a color. There are usually several mask tools but on something like that the custom or Freehand mask that lets you click points and "trace" the shape work best. You can do a section at a time . The objective it to drop out the background clutter .

The auto tools to auto create masks can work but typically there needs to be rather sharp contrast between the object and background

If you blow a picture up so you can start to see the individual pixels , you start to see the issue. They "dither" the pixels with shapes of colors to not have hard edges and the ability to sort what is supposed to be foreground and background gets fuzzy.

What I used to LOVE was a customer coming in for a sign or hanging that had a logo and all they had was a photo of it with a busy background.
Trying to hand trace text is a bad idea. The human eye expects characters to be nice and even and symmetrical . ANY ragged ness gets picked up by the eye that reads in shapes . Fonts are compete objects with constant size and shapes and hand tracing them gets really tense or if you alto trace they come out UGLY!.

.

[ben de lappe]

David,

Hopefully this glimpse offers a little insight.

With the image selected click 'Bitmaps' and from the drop down menu click 'resample...'. The resulting popup is what you see here with settings for size, resolution etc.

This shot shows my various input however this time I left the size of the image alone.

Left image is resampled, right is the original. I'm sure I could have gone much further.

[ben de lappe]

Typical way in most bitmap programs is to create a mask around the object you want to keep and then reverse it sop iit everything outside the mask and you use the FILL tool to fill with a color. There are usually several mask tools but on something like that the custom or Freehand mask that lets you click points and "trace" the shape work best. You can do a section at a time . The objective it to drop out the background clutter .

The auto tools to auto create masks can work but typically there needs to be rather sharp contrast between the object and background

If you blow a picture up so you can start to see the individual pixels , you start to see the issue. They "dither" the pixels with shapes of colors to not have hard edges and the ability to sort what is supposed to be foreground and background gets fuzzy.

What I used to LOVE was a customer coming in for a sign or hanging that had a logo and all they had was a photo of it with a busy background.
Trying to hand trace text is a bad idea. The human eye expects characters to be nice and even and symmetrical . ANY ragged ness gets picked up by the eye that reads in shapes . Fonts are compete objects with constant size and shapes and hand tracing them gets really tense or if you alto trace they come out UGLY!.

In my 10 minutes of photo-paint experience I've noticed that masking is a learned artform quite similar to hand tracing an image in CAD. While it's fairly easy to remove the background as I did with the dog it gets a lot more complicated when the product has to look good. All the additive, subtractive, transparency and other tools will take some time to become proficient.

Amen on the text hand tracing. Even if I can see it well enough I will replace it 100% of the time. Just looks so much better.

[adbuch]

Ben - thanks for those screen shots! I will check it out.
David

[Dirtmotor]

I have been following , tried your coral draw resize 300 to 900 went ok , 900 to 1200 crashed my computer .
Looks like it would work with enough computer .

[ben de lappe]

I have been following , tried your coral draw resize 300 to 900 went ok , 900 to 1200 crashed my computer .
Looks like it would work with enough computer .

The first day of learning my way around CorelDraw I clicked something inadvertently that caused the program to buffer, then finally crash. No clue what I did but like you say that moment made me realize that 'processing power' could be imperative in some applications. I don't have a fancy computer, just an ASUS laptop I've used for CAD drawing nearly nine years now.

I wanted to see what would happen if I pushed my sample pic up to 1200 and it processed fine in about 10 seconds however I get the feeling more colorful and complex images will take more graphics memory.

[CNC_rowdy]

Thanks all for the info here. It is good to know there are gurus out there that can help.
Thanks all,
Timbo