The best way to use it, from this point on, is to quickly skim through until you find a sample image that is similar to the kind of image you need to convert. You can see that they are more like typical strokes, that a sketch artist might make with pen, pencil or charcoal, etc.Īctually this is sort of a master tutorial, explaining some basic concepts, and guiding you to the particular tutorial you might need. I colored them red, to make it easier to see. The images on the right of the bold blue line, show how the paths look when traced by hand, with the Pen/Bezier or Pencil/Freehand tool. (The settings I used to create that auto-trace can be found in this tutorial.) So you can see that the image is made up of very detailed closed paths, rather than a series of single lines or strokes. (Only 7 can be seen in that section and 1 is the white background, in case you're counting.) I placed a red outline around the color which is selected, to help you see it better. Basically there are 8 scans creating 8 different colored compound paths (actually 8 shades of gray here) all stacked up on top of each other.

The 3 images on the left of the bold blue line demonstrate what happens when you use Inkscape's Trace Bitmap (or other trace engine). In the end, it will pay off to learn how to use it, even if you just have one project to complete.ĭifference Between Auto-Trace and Hand-Trace But most of the time, the Pen/Bezier tool is best - even it if takes a little longer to learn. In some cases, it might be possible to use the Pencil/Freehand tool.

Help menu > Tutorials > Advanced - It's not really advanced, but instead, most of it is an introduction to vector paths (except for the first section on pasting techniques and the last section on text).

Help menu > Inkscape manual (needs an internet connection, unless you purchase the manual) or direct link.

A long, detailed tutorial I wrote a while ago, as an introduction to drawing vector paths: How to Draw a 'Line' with Inkscape However, it does not cover editing paths - only drawing them.

The tutorials you will find below show how to use the Pen/Bezier tool and Trace Bitmap feature, for all the various situations you might encounter, when converting a raster image to vector (or as many as I can think of, anyway).

any past experience with Inkscape you may have the quality and complexity of the original raster imageģ. your intended use or goal for the converted imageĢ.

Convert an image to vector inkscape