Tracing Tips & Tricks — #6 Text and Potential Pitfalls

Today we’re continuing in our series on Tracing. If you haven’t read the previous lessons, start here.  I could have included this in the last lesson, but it was getting pretty long so I thought you could use a break. We’re going to cover what to do when you absolutely have to trace text, and the types of things you need to watch out for as you trace simple images.

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Tracing text

As I said in Lesson 2, words don’t usually trace well. The corners are not crisp and the lines are not straight as they are if you type them. I always recommend finding a font and typing the words over tracing them. Here’s a reminder of the difference (top is traced, bottom is typed)–

A relatively new feature in Silhouette Studio is the Warp tool. This allows you to shape an image or text into something like a megaphone or diamond. You can use standard shape templates or warp freehand. Again, I recommend this over doing something like a trace.

Sometimes, you won’t have the option to use a font because you’ve been given some artwork by a client, or you don’t have the Warp tool as it’s in Designer Edition and up. In instances like this where you have to trace text, there are some ways to make it easier.

Tips for tracing text

• If possible, start with a word that is a solid color. We’ve already seen that those are easiest to trace.
• Start with the highest possible resolution of your word image. Follow the rules we’ve already covered for whether or not to resize your word image before you trace it.
• If you wind up with extra bits/holes inside your traced word, release the compound path, delete the bits, then remake the compound path.
  
• Learn some basic point editing techniques to clean up your trace. You will very likely need to change some curved line segments into flat ones.
• If you want to use the Simplify option in point editing, do it BEFORE you enlarge the image at all. When you enlarge and then Simplify, it tends to add unnecessary points. However, if it’s too small, the image gets distorted. It’s a balancing act.
• To do a word shape where you have the font but do not have Designer Edition, type and shape the word in another program such as Power Point, turn it into Word Art, fill it with black, save it as a picture, then trace it in Silhouette Studio. The lines will be fairly straight and crisp and can be cleaned up more easily with point editing. It is also relatively easy to do in Inkscape, which is a free program.

Potential tracing pitfalls

There are a couple of other things to watch out for when you’re tracing images. As in previous lessons, you can click on any of the images to be taken to a page where you can download it to practice with.

Opening in the image

Let’s look at this owl image I want to trace.

Let’s pretend I want to trace it, then separate the pieces so that I can cut it from several colors of my material — one for the body, one for the stomach, one for the eyes, etc. I do my trace and, as I should, I immediately fill it with color.

I decide to release the compound path so that I can separate the pieces. Here’s what I get—

Hmmmm. That’s not what I was expecting. The stomach area does not seem to be a piece. What’s going on?

If I zoom in at the bottom left, I see that in my original image, there’s an opening I hadn’t noticed.

When I trace, that opening is going to mean that I don’t have a solid outer piece (background piece).

Closing the gap

To fix that, I’m going to go back to my traced image before I released the compound path. I draw a small shape (in blue here) to bridge that gap, then weld it to the traced image.

Now, when I release the compound path, I do have the solid outer piece (the yellow) and a stomach piece (I’ve recolored that green).

I would then edit the points to smooth out the contours there. If I wanted to separate the face area, I’d do some more editing.

Instead of welding a shape on, I could just use some point editing by breaking and joining paths. But that’s more complicated so I’d go the easy route.

Now let’s look at the eyes. On the left, the outermost portion is separate from the outside piece, but on the right it’s connected to the main background piece. I’ve recolored the pieces here so you can see the difference pieces.

If I pull the green piece away, you can see even easier.

There are 2 parts to deal with — the opening above the right eye, and the connection at the lower edge.

If I wanted to make that right eye the same as the left, I’d need to do 2 things–

1. Draw a “bridge” shape and weld to eliminate the gap at the top.
   
2. For the lower portion, I need to get RID of a bridge that’s already there. This time, I draw the shape and use Subtract in my Modify panel. That will remove the portion that’s behind my blue shape.
   

After that, I release the compound path to separate the pieces

Then I’d do some point editing to clean it up.

Working with the beak

Since we’re doing great, let’s do one more thing. Notice that the lower part of the beak is attached to the left outer eye but not to the right one. We have 2 choices if we want to change that.

1. To make it all one piece, we’d weld draw a piece between the beak and eye, select both pieces plus the shape and weld.
   
2. If we want them to be separate, we use the Subtract option to get rid of the area that’s connecting the beak to the left eye. What we have to do is get rid of the bridge this time. So we draw a shape that covers the bridge, select it and the left outer eye, and use Subtract. The shape disconnect the pieces, as if the bridge got washed out. We then can fill the shapes with separate colors, which indicates they are separate pieces.
   

The techniques you need to use will depend on your original image. This isn’t something you’re going to want to have to mess with all the time, but you now you know how to do it when you need to.

Extra practice

Here are a few more images with gaps in the outer edges to practice with.

Hidden pieces

I’ve recommended that you fill a traced image with color so that you can see what you’ve got. And I’ve told you that you can release the compound path to separate it into pieces. There’s something here you need to watch for.

When you release the compound path, you may seem to “lose” some pieces. What happens is that the software determines the front to back/top to bottom order of the pieces, and the piece you expect to wind up in front might not. It may get hidden behind another piece. It’s still there – you just can’t see it.

This can also happen as you weld on extra pieces. When you do that, you are combining several pieces into a single one. A single piece can only be in one location in the order. That means that the resulting piece might come to the front of the order and obscure other pieces.

For this reason, I also recommend altering the transparency of the fill color. When you do that, you can see through any pieces to what may be hiding behind them. Trust me – this will save you a LOT of headaches.

Practice image

Let’s take a look at this elephant.

That’s a pretty easy trace because of the black outlines. Here’s my resulting trace and my pieces after I release the compound path. I recolored them so you can see all the different pieces.

Let’s say I decide that I want the the outermost pieces of the eyes to be connected to one another instead of separate pieces.

So, I scoot them closer together and weld them.

What happened to the brown pieces of the left eye??? When I welded, the newly-formed black piece moved in front of it. If I raise the transparency level, I can see it hiding back there. I don’t see it’s red cut line, which tells me its behind the pink piece.

Imagine how that would cause problems if I didn’t know if was there.

For extra practice, take some of the designs you’ve already traced and weld some parts together. Watch what happens to the pieces.

Extra bits

Let’s stay with that elephant so I can show you something else. If I do a trace without adjusting my Threshold filter well, the software is going to pick up some of the grays and they show up as tiny little bits of pieces.

I should have adjusted my Threshold filter down to around 39 so it wouldn’t pick all those up, but I only went to 40. Yes, even a subtle difference of 1 tick in the number can change the outcome.

Sometimes, no matter how well you adjust your filters, you’ll get those little bits. It just depends on the coloring of your image. To get rid of them, you can release the compound path, select and group all the pieces you do want, move those aside, then delete all the leftover bits. I find this process faster than trying to grab all the little pieces.

Up Next

There are some other pitfalls in tracing, but we’ll cover those as we get into harder traces. Next time, we’ll begin to trace some simple photos.