Quality Tracing

[sallybode]

You have to play with the various modes, this was done with smoothing set to 50% and detail to 100% in Detail Line art. The scan was done at 400 dpi on a Canon scanner.

I did some adjustment on the text to make some of the edges more square and I made the torn back edges myself with the gradient tool. The rest is pure Power Trace.

[Sark]

The download is too big for me, but it was only to try Trace, and see if contours issues have been solved in Draw, that I wanted to give it a go.
It seems Trace may well have been improved. I'm using Flash for tracing for now, but maybe when a good UK offer on X3 appears I might take the plunge.

Sark

[sallybode]

What is nice is that you have control over color, traces are not just natively RGB anymore, you can choose. If you don't want the colors in the scan, you can change any color to any other as you can access all the palettes in CD including spot color. If there are too many colors, caused by the inherent halo to round off from the anti-aliasing, you can merge these together so that you can get rid of a lot of items in a scan that wasn't possible before.

I always figure I will have to do some tweaking to a trace, but there is so much less to tweak. I don't know how it compares to that one scanning software you bought, Sark, can't remember the name just now. It is as good as anything I have tried and it is easy to use, you can do all of the editing inside the one window because the preview is so big and can be zoomed and zoomed out.

Really if for no other reason, the ability to trace makes the upgrade price worth it to me.

It has taken me a while to get used to apparent bugs in this version, but it has to do mostly for breaking the shapes of the what used to be called Power Lines. But it has to do with having "Treat as Filled" turned on and then the item deselected, reselected and then it can be broken. If I was going to be drawing a lot of these lines, I think I'd do the drawing in Xara, and then import it as an .ai file and then do what I needed to do in CD. Or go back to 12 and then reopen in X3.

[Peter Clifton]

Sally,

I may be wrong on this, but I guess it depends on the project requirements, to me when someone asks for a vector trace of a bitmap they are expecting one of two things

1. A reinterpretation of a complex bitmap (photograph, hand drawn illustration)

2. A scaleable almost exact copy of a logo, illustration from a poor quality original for high quality print or massive enlargement.

Whilst I applaud Corel's efforts regarding trace, which may provide a better starting point. In my experience it has always been better to hand trace an original, layering the necessary colours or reinterpreting the design. I have yet to find any automated process that can do this. I am far more impressed with the smart fill tool, The ability to create closed curves from separate curves has speeded up this admittedly tedious process quite a bit.

I hope the following examples (done in an earlier version of Draw) convey my thoughts.

The coat of arms is much simpler and I was able to include this in Office documents only increasing the size by some 60 kilobytes.

The second example (a personal project) was an attempt to do a direct copy of an anime image, everything from lines to fills are layered, which makes for extreme portabilty and of course scalability. The resultant image was almost exactly the same size in bytes as the poorer quality source.

I really wish I had the smart fill tool back then as I had to cut and trim lines to form closed curves.

I have a real thing about node counts in vector images and when possible take time to reduce them to the absolute minimum.

I guess some automation is a good thing but I honestly believe that to deliver what a customer expects still requires a lot of tedious node manipulation.

Peter

[sallybode]

I always edit my traces. And yes, if I was drawing a cartoon, I'd do it diffferently. The ability to do text is quite good.

You can merge colors and get to spot colors, maybe this isn't useful but I find it so, and then you can eliminate extra nodes after you bring in the trace with I find again, useful.

I don't understand why a company should put forth any effort to improve their product, perhaps they should just roll back all the improvements and re-release 8. There are times when progress takes one giant step backwards because they get a new crop of college grads who just never got any printer's ink under their fingernails and are sold lock, stock and barrel on software making up for a good product, such a case are new HP scanners and their software. No longer are capable of scanning in .wmf, and it is really too bad.

Very often I just don't have the time to redraw a logo, however if I can get some help along the way, I don't have to start from square one, I have to take a look at what is in the to do box.

So I have to pace myself and plan how much time I can afford to spend on a project.

If you have unlimited time the trace by hand is going to be superior. CorelTrace does not replace being a real artist. (Although that may disappoint people who are in the field.)

Sally Bode

[Peter Clifton]

Sally,

Funny I always regarded Draw 8 as a bit of a problem, but having been in the Corel newsgroups for many years, I know from experience that every user has their own take. My favourite was Draw 9 once SP1 and SP2 were applied to get back the Draw 8 and earlier snapping modes.

Things did go downhill a bit with Draw 10 and only really started to improve with Draw 12.

I work almost exclusively for print, all the time keeping one eye on possible electronic uses. I don't do art as such (severe lack of talant) I tend to work with real world stuff being a technical illustrator.

I hope Corel continue to provide new ways / tools to get vectors on to a page and manipulate them once created.

I am waiting for X3 to get approved for installation on computers where I work, unfortunately this process can take a while :-(

I have been trying to reproduce the bug you described earlier in the thread re: treat objects as filled in connection with artistic media strokes, not having much luck, seems to be working on my install, can you perhaps elaborate a bit.

Peter

P.S. Many happy returns for yesterday.

P.P.S I like the parrot

[sallybode]

When I went back and tested it, I found that it is the way in which I was selecting the line which was odd, if clicking on the outline, you can break the line, if clicking on the interior of the line, you cannot break it. When there are two nodes at the head of the line (lines were drawin from left to right) the line is breakable, but not when clicked internally, (the example with only one node showing in the head of the line). If I marquis select the line, it is always breakable.

When you click on these lines in 12, they behave differently, I think when I thought it was the "treat as filled" that I inadvertantly clicked in a new place and thought this was the problem.

There is a great sensitivity to where you click, you have to know this or you will not be able to change it. This is odd.

I was reading in another forum, unleash.com regarding a similar behavior with text boxes, not being able to select the text box by clicking on it, maybe it is you really have to watch where you are clicking. And if you are a lucky clicker, you may not see the fluke. I myself have not experienced the fluke, but if the bug was always reproduceable, you could figure out what the problem is. I guess some glitches don't have to do with the program itself unless you get the slow down I got from having the font display turned on for the whole list of fonts. Not using the font manager can lead to a lot of problems.

The only othe real problem I have experiences it X3 doesn't see our one landscape press as that, it sees it as being a portrait press so I have to always use custom settings for height and width, otherwise the full image doesn't go to the imagesetter.

Once I understand what is happening, I can live with it.