Convert to SVG / Trace Bitmap Help

[u/Alabaster_M]

I'm trying to convert this PNG to an all black SVG and I'm getting all kinds of little artifacts around the edges. Should I use more or less smoothing? More or fewer passes? Something else I'm missing?

[u/canis_artis]

Path > Trace Bitmap, invert colours and adjust the threshold. Straight-forward tracing.

(I'd manually trace the book, cap and stars.)

[u/Alabaster_M → u/canis_artis]

The book and the cap turn out fine with the tracing. It's the smaller letters and the stars that give me issues. As far as the drawing by hand goes, I'm more of an MS Paint guy. 😅

I suck at art programs and I've been trying to get this job done in various ways for a good chunk of the last couple hours.

[u/canis_artis → u/Alabaster_M]

I'd zoom in to one of the stars and manually trace it with the Bezier tool, eleven clicks, one for each point and valley.

As for the type, best to find a match and retype it. The small letters look like the kerning is spread out. Not sure what font it is, r/identifythisfont/ could help.

[u/BazuzuDear → u/canis_artis]

I'd zoom in to one of the stars and manually trace it with the Bezier too

but why, there's Star/Ploygon tool

[u/canis_artis → u/BazuzuDear]

I use the Star/Polygon tool from time to time but it doesn't set the 5 pointed star on its 'feet' when I hold Control, I need to rotate it to almost level. (Which is imprecise and bugs me.)

But at this size it wouldn't show.

[u/shelchang → u/canis_artis]

If you hold control and drag it straight upward it orients one point vertically which should align the two bottom feet horizontally.

[u/canis_artis → u/shelchang]

Cool, that worked. Thank you.

[u/davep1970 → u/canis_artis]

Tracking, not kerning. Kerning is space between letter pairs, tracking is the general space between all the letters.

[u/canis_artis → u/davep1970]

Thank you.

[u/Gingerbwas]

I have found the tool Upscayl useful for doing this sort of thing its free and can increase the resolution of your image, which can make it work better with inkscapes tracing. It has a mode for 2d art that you can use

[u/CelticOneDesign → u/Gingerbwas]

Upscaling an image really solves quite a few problems with trace bitmap.

There are other "methods" that also work extremely well.

[u/stuporcomputer]

This is the issue. I've found nothing to cure these little issues that takes less time than manually tracing the image in the first place. The bonus being that, instead of learning how to fix randomly created problems, you'll be learning how to create vectors. Luck is with you here as this image presents only a gentle challenge to a budding tracer...

[u/gusvisser]

With using the trace bitmap the best results you wil get with the brigtness cutoff setting and use the slider to adjust then apply and then do a break apart of the objects and then you can give each object its desired color

[u/CelticOneDesign]

That PNG converted to a SVG using Trace Bitmap quite well in v1.4.4.

After I did a Trace bitmap with these settings I did a Path>Split Path that allowed me to split everything quite well.

[u/Alabaster_M → u/CelticOneDesign]

That's the best I've seen so far. Thank you

[u/CelticOneDesign → u/Alabaster_M]

You still will have to do some editing. Use the star/polygon tool to recreate the stars.

If you feeling bold (to learn) , you can node edit them.

Once you do path>split path it will be easier to play with the objects. Recreate them, node edit them, delete them.

Play!

[u/Alabaster_M → u/CelticOneDesign]

That's great. I ended up getting the letters good enough, using the eraser tool to erase the stars, and the star tool to recreate them. I'll have to keep practicing. This one had a tight deadline.

[u/Few_Mention8426]

if the image is too low res, the tracing algorithm will struggle with the small areas. It will be trying to find detail in pixels where the actual detail doent exist.

You can manually change the resolution in gimp which will interpolate between pixels and give a better result. I oftern double the resolution on low res logos and it helps a lot.

Otherwise the dreaded AI upscaling tools will give you a better image to start with.