In the Details section, you will find settings that are used to fine tune the traced image. This feature seems to work best with the Color option. There needs to be contrast between the background and image to make it easier for the feature to identify and remove. Remove Background, when checked, will remove light or white backgrounds. We will show an example of this with the Colors option below. When the box is unchecked, the result is like that of a cut out. When the box is checked, the scans are stacked on top of each other. The Stack option removes any gaps between layers and adds a fill. To avoid losing detail, do not increase this too high. The Smooth option uses a Gaussian blur to smooth out any jagged edges before scanning. You can now separate and edit each layer as we did in the image below.Įdit Smooth, Stack and Remove Background Options With the 10 scans done, right-click the trace and select Ungroup. Depending on how the feature has scanned your image, you can ungroup the design into layers. For this image, we needed to increase the scans to 10 in order for everything to be included.Īfter the image has been scanned, it then becomes an editable vector design. So this is where you will need to experiment and test out the results. If we increase the Scans to the default setting of 8, you can see that the Preview looks about right, but when we click Apply, not everything has been scanned. The Preview doesn’t seem to accurately display what the result will be. We clicked Apply and ended up with the grayed result on the right side. In the Preview, the result looks a little strange. In the example below, we set the Brightness steps to 2 scans. You can then use the Move tool to reposition it. Once you click Apply, the traced image will be placed on top of the original image. With this option, you will only get shades of black, white and gray. The lowest scan of 2 will contain the darkest shade while more scans will add layers or steps of lighter shades. The Brightness steps setting scans the image for different shades of dark and light.

Click on Multicolor to see the options available. Brightness Steps in Trace BitmapĪfter you have opened your design in Inkscape, click on Path > Trace Bitmap and the settings will open in a window on the right side of the screen. The Single scan method doesn't need a high amount of resources but the quality may decrease a bit. You can also trace your image using the single scan option for simple black and white results.

Editing vector images in inkscape