bitmap tracing

[Eric]

what was tying to do was import some of my stuff from psp7 and try to trace them so i can edit them in xara, what i noticed was even simple line drawings turn into multi-lined shapes with a lot of artefacts and spuria [if that's how you spell it?] added to the original. I too have tried a lot of tracers to no avail, it seems the old grey matter still rules the roost.
here's one of my early psp pix and you can imagine what a meal the tracer made of this

cheers
scouse eric.
[img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_cool.gif[/img]

[michaelward]

Yeah, the Bitmap Tracers seem to make a real hash out of clean images with straight line (you'd think that would be the easy part for them!).

With an image such as this, you safest bet is to import it into Xara and trace over the top of it manually.

Michael Ward

P.S. You live in Runcorn Scouse Eric? That's not too far from Leigh is it? You may know about Leigh if you used to watch the Rugby League team in Runcorn. (What happened to them?)

[jclements]

Eric, In your case where you've got the original file, then I'd first go into PS and remove all the fancy shadowing and transparencies and even do a color reduction, then export the results.

The result would (should) be something that any bitmap tracer (flash, xara, or coreldraw) could handle and not produce excessive artifacts.

That said, the image you've shown above would be extremely easy to draw over the top of in Xara because almost the entire illustration is composed of simple rectangles and ellipses and a couple arcs.

Import the bitmap, press F10 (Layer Gallery), lock layer the bitmap resides on, and create a new "top" layer. Lay some guidelines along key edges (ie., the bottom of dials) or as center-lines of the dials/knobs. Turn on snap to guides and have at it with the rectangle and ellipse tool. Drawing the main shapes should not take more than a few minutes (not hours) with the exception of the dials which may take a bit more effort for a new-comer. I would imagine that adding the fills and transparencies is where most of your efforts would be spent. Ross can probably confirm this.

Regards, John

By the way do you have any Bang & O stereo components drawn? I was in Seattle two weeks ago and walked by their store ... incredible looking amps, speakers, etc., some with gold finishes.

[Oscar]

Yes you can trace photo, but it doesn't really depend on the tracer that much since most of them are now quite good (well there are just few methods or tracing anyway)
What it depends is on a pre-processing the image.
Now most of the bitmap effect you mention may help but will not do it right.
There is a process called color segmentation - which is actually kind of vectorising process by itself - it first compute vectors of all pixel colors then work on the vectors to simplify it.
Now it depends on how good the segmentation is, but it may produce a very good results (for example on portraits) - the segmented image is then fed into a tracer, and good configured tracer can trace it into very reasonable number of shapes. This is how it could be done. But again don't expect automatic mirracles, as everything it takes knowledge.
I know because I wrote one segmenter.

[tad]

Hello Oscar,
Tell us MORE about your "segmenter" and "segmentation". I understand color reduction, but am very interested in this "kind of vectorising"
Regards.........Tad