Getting the most from the new trace X3

[sallybode]

Had to use the trace function in X3 to make a seal for the City of Los Angeles from a rather poor .gif image I was emailed. I figured that there might be a better, larger image on the web which there was but there was no vector artwork.

Since what I needed was black and white as for one part, I hade to use the seal on a business card, the other is for blind embossing. The line art option is actually quite good, but before going that route immediately, I cleaned it up as best I could first in PhotoPaint, increased the contrast and used the threshold command to bring it down further. I did a little editing with selecting some pixels by hand and changing them to either white or black, saved back to DRAW and went to PowerTrace. The line art reduced it to white, black and two grays, I told it two colors and my trace was done.

Whereas the text was really perfect there were some items I improved and redid to make a clean logo.

Thanks to the cleaner edge it now gives, I really was quite pleased. I had figured I'd be needed to redraw a few items and that was really all I had to do.