Tracing a bitmap -- quality terrible...what am I doing wrong?

**Glenoran1** · 07 October 2006, 05:19 PM

I have hundreds of bitmapped scans of hand-drawn designs I'd love to trace, but the quality comes out like this (or variations of this, as I tweak the options). The first is the original bitmap, the second is the traced version.

Can anyone please tell me how to get a 'clean' tracing? It becomes even worse when I have a coloured (filled) design.

Many thanks for any advice you can offer.

Regards,

Glenoran1

**Glenoran1** · 07 October 2006, 05:23 PM

Oops, sorry ...

My e-mail is gprobert@shaw.ca.

Regards,

Glenoran1

**Intbel** · 07 October 2006, 05:37 PM

A manual trace using either the shape editor tool or the pen tool is your best option for those sort of designs.

**Albacore** · 07 October 2006, 08:08 PM

Have a really good look here, its the best views I ahve read on the subject by the looks of what you are trying to do. : http://www.xaraxone.com/guest/guest62/

**Glenoran1** · 07 October 2006, 08:30 PM

Thank you very much, Intbel and Albacore. Albacore, I'll print out this tutorial and use it to work on my drawings.

All the best,

Glenoran1

**WolfMoonHP** · 08 October 2006, 04:50 AM

The bitmap tracer is the fastest I have ever seen, but unless the raster image is razor sharp, even the maximum smoothness will leave a huge number of unnecessary points. To get a good result, I tried a combination of re-drawing the simpler shapes, using the brush tool, and for other sections, deleting some of the superfluous points.

**sallybode** · 08 October 2006, 01:48 PM

As WolfMoonHP said the quality of the bitmap is the determining factor. If you simply have no time, the fastest way is to optimize the bitmap then do a Xara Trace.

**Glenoran1** · 08 October 2006, 04:35 PM

Many thanks to all of you who were kind enough to help me with my tracing issues. I will try rescanning at the highest dpi I can and use all your suggestions to achieve the best-quality trace possible.

Regards,

Glenoran1
gprobert@shaw.ca

**stlewis** · 08 October 2006, 08:38 PM

Hi

I wonder if a manual trace may be the best approach

This took 3 minutes - not complete but a start!

**Glenoran1** · 08 October 2006, 09:49 PM

Yes, I've come to the conclusion you're right. The drawing I used as an example is very simple, but I have huge complex ones which will take a long time to manually trace. But at least Xara Xtreme does that job very well indeed, as it does with everything else I've used, the only exception being the trace function. But that's probably a work-in-progress and will be improved in future versions.

Once again, many thanks to all of you who were kind enough to respond.

All the best,

Glenoran1