Bitmap Tracer Blues

[handrawn]

did I say it was better? - my point is that it is different

For my purposes it's not suitable

sure I understand that - but it does not make it a piece of crap; nor is anyone 'blind'

back in the day I used to think the inkscape tracer was better because it produced smoother outlines and that was what I needed; but I reckon now that it is horses for courses - for example if you are doing poster work for walls would the jaggies matter if you could not see them unless you came so close you couldn't see the picture anyway - this is an argument that has been thrashed out before as well

in any case given the choice I would these days prefer to use illustrator for the sort of work the OP posted

[handrawn]

a quick example [very quick ]

[handrawn]

and again in colour - photographic 10 pass

you can see a bit of banding - but again only if you are up close - there is some tweaking needed on the beak - but that is tweaking of the source, not the trace

personally I don't think the xara tracer was ever meant to convert raster into perfect vector, not sure any tracer can be that accurate, but the xara tracer can do a very good job of converting raster 'pencil and paint' effects into a vector format and that is what I think it was originally meant for....

[theinonen]

But is there really anything to be gained doing pixel level tracing as you lose every advantage of using vectors in first place? Your vectorized bitmap image will be huge, usually many times as large as the original bitmap file. Also it will not really scale any better, as vector version will get blocky as well.

I did quick test using excellent Image Outliner on RISC OS and the vector version is 9 kB, when the original enlarged bitmap was 550 kB. This makes sense, but tracing something and getting 2 times or more larger file in return makes very little.

[ernie-f]

O.K. handrawn,
I see we got difference purposes. Why I need a tracer? To trace outlines or shapes converted to vectors. Where I need vectors? In all printing jobs, for logos, for vehicle labeling, for screen print, laser cutting, CNC etc. I need perfect pathes with a minimum nodes.

I don't need to trace gardients because this is silly. Even I don't need to trace colors because I need CMYK or HKS and sometimes PMS. So the traced colors are obsolete. Tracing rasters are silly too because if you scale them the raster will be scaled too.

So for what is Xaras tracer (for me) helpfull? …

Xaras trace modul has in the time I work with Xara, this is now 10 Years, never got an update. Potrace has from 2003 to 2017, 4 updates and Peter is still working on it to improve the tracer. And Xara? 365!

Servus Ernie

[handrawn]

O.K. handrawn,
I see we got difference purposes

I agree, an overhaul to the xara tracer is long overdue - but then so are so many other things on the drawing side

But is there really anything to be gained doing pixel level tracing as you lose every advantage of using vectors in first place?

Yes - you get to create things in seconds that take a lot longer in vector - for example I dare say you could do it all in xara with art brushes, but they are a pain to use, so fiddly compared to raster brushes [floating windows would help here too if xara is listening]

Your vectorized bitmap image will be huge, usually many times as large as the original bitmap file.

not so in the examples I posted

Also it will not really scale any better, as vector version will get blocky as well.

fair point - but if you were doing this as part of an artistic process, as opposed to a design process, the line art and colouring could be exported separately and the lineart trace in greyscale and the colouring in photographic - the greyscale will not block like the photographic

and indeed, folowing on from what ernie said about colour trace being obsolete, in this case it may be better to create the gradients in xara after tracing the lineart in greyscale, but it was only a quick example - if the colouring were done in 'digital pencil' effect like the line art then it would be worthwhile tracing - but again maybe in greyscale adding the hues in xara

as I say, this is an artistic process, not a design one