Tracing tips & tricks — #4 Simple, solid shapes

So far in our tracing series, we’ve just been learning about the prep work — the most important part of any project. (You can start with Lesson 1 here).  We’ve discussed file types and image selection and gotten an overview of the Trace panel. Now we’re ready to jump into some simple traces.

Note: This post contains affiliate links. That means if you click the link and purchase something, I may receive a small commission. You pay the same price. This helps me to be able to keep my business going and provide more tutorials.

The images I’m using

I’m using images from a website called Pixabay. I’m going to link them so that you can download them and practice on the same images. It’s free and you can even use the images to make products you sell. I’m not an affiliate for them — it’s just a simple way for us to use the same graphics. Just click on the image to go to the page to download it. You’ll notice that you can choose different sizes for the download. If you’ve read the previous lessons, you’ll know what to do :).

Opening the image

To start, go to File>Open, find the computer folder where you have the image saved, highlight the file and select OK (or double click). This will open the image as a new file on your drawing area.

To open it onto the same file you are already working in, use File>Merge.

You may need to resize your image, depending on its resolution.

• Good (high) resolution — These open very large on your drawing area. Make them smaller if it makes it easier for you to work with it that way. I make it fit in the mat area.
• Medium resolution — These you can usually trace right at the size they open.
• Low resolution —  You often get a better trace by keeping it small and zooming in rather than enlarging. After you perform the trace, you can then enlarge the cut image. Because it’s a vector image (review Lesson 1 if you need to remember what those are), making it larger will not make it fuzzier as it would if it were a raster image.

You just have to experiment to find what works for your image. After you’ve learned more, you can do several traces with the image at different sizes and compare them. If you’re doing the images linked above, you shouldn’t need to resize them. This is just info for the future.

One side note. Silhouette Studio will tell you on every single image — no matter how good the resolution — that it’s low resolution. Ignore that warning — it always happens and isn’t always true.

Right now, open the fox (or a solid, black image with no internal pieces) and resize as needed, then open the Trace panel.

Selecting the Trace area

The first thing you’ll do is define what area you want to trace. In this case, we want the entire fox. Click Select Trace Area. Move your cursor until it’s slightly above and to the left of the fox. Click and drag your mouse toward the lower right of the fox.

At this point, you’ll see 3 things–

1. A gray box is around the image.
2. Yellow is on top of the image.
3. The options in the panel are active.

The yellow indicates the shape the software would create if you trace right this moment. Remember that you can view that as a solid or outline. Solid shows the resulting shape. Outline shows where the cut lines would be. The way you view it doesn’t change how the trace creates cut lines — it just gives you the option to view it in the way that makes sense to you.

Performing the trace

Because the fox is a nice, solid black, you should see a full yellow shape and don’t need to make any adjustments to any filters so pass over those for now. At the bottom of the panel, click Trace. Again, 3 things will happen–

1. The gray box goes away.
2. The yellow goes away.
3. All the options in the panel other than Select Trace Area are inactive again.

It may not look like anything happened, but it did. Click on your raster image (it’s still there) and move it to the side. You’ll see the familiar red line that indicates the cut lines of a shape.

That, my friend, is your first trace.

Just so you know, you could choose Trace Outer Edge if you like. On this particular image, it would be exactly the same as Trace. We’ll look at tracing the outer edge in a bit.

After the trace

As soon as you trace, fill the image with a color. Any color will do, but I prefer a light color. The reason you fill it with a color is to make it easier to analyze and grab.

To practice this again, follow all the same steps and trace the girl. And then, do the red heart. Even though this image isn’t black, because its light value is deep you should still be able to trace it without making any changes to the filters.

If you aren’t using my images, you should still be working with solid images with strong edges (good resolution), dark color and no internal pieces.

Using Trace Outer Edge

Now open the image that looks like a fancy shield. Follow all the same steps except this time use Trace Outer Edge. Notice when I fill my traced shape, it looks different than the original — it doesn’t have the stripes in the middle because they are internal pieces.

This is the option you’d use if you have an image with internal pieces and don’t want those holes in your resulting cut image. You might use this on something like a Print and Cut. If you DID want those internal pieces, you’d use Trace as we did before. Do that now for some extra practice.

Using Trace and Detach

Now let’s look at the 3rd option — Trace and Detach. For this, we’ll use the image of the woman on a bike. What this does is separate the image from any white background that is present. If I pull the image off to the side, you can see that white background.

Follow the same steps as before to define the trace area, but your results will be different with Trace and Detach. The software will create a cut along the outer edge of the graphic so that you have 2 pieces — the image and the white background. The background would just look like a rectangle with a woman-on-a-bike-shaped-hole in it. Think of it like rolling out cookie dough and using a cookie cutter to cut a shape in it.

It may not be immediately apparent because you don’t see that red line around the image, but if I go to the Send area you can see them.

The software does NOT create cut lines inside the image, so it’s like Trace Outer Edge in that sense. Notice that the spaces between the spokes on the wheels aren’t cut parts. It’s only eliminating the outer background around the image.

If you want to cut those inner pieces, you would then need to do a regular trace of the image again. I’ll talk about that more below.

Don’t Trace and Detach on a regular trace

I recommend you don’t use Trace and Detach unless you really need it. Because the software is processing more information (trying to decide where the outer edge is), it can be much slower. How much slower depends on the image you’re using. Look at this image and notice that it’s very difficult to distinguish what the “outer edge” would be because of the background.

Because of that, if I use Trace and Detach the software is going to have a pretty hard time. It takes a long time to process, then look at how many pieces it creates. All those black squares are separate little pieces.

Plus, if you want to cut the internal pieces, you’d have to do a second trace on any image after doing Trace and Detach. I’ll show you how to do that farther down in the post.

So when should you use Trace and Detach?

You may be wondering why in the world you’d want to use this option. There are 3 very good uses–

Overlapping pieces

When you want to put images close together, you don’t want the white background from one image obscuring the other on a Print and Cut. Trace and Detach eliminates this issue. If your image is a PNG, the background is usually clear, but the software adds a white background unless you have AutoTrace on. (We’ll cover what that is in just a bit.).

When you want to create a stencil

Normally when you trace, you only get the shape as a cut file. The original raster image is still there, but it’s the same as it was when you opened it.  If you use Trace and Detach, you get both the image and the background as separate parts like we saw above. The background piece works great as a stencil. Just know it’s for a solid shape, not one with inner pieces.

If you do want a stencil with inner pieces, you can do a regular trace, then draw a rectangle around the outside of the created pieces and turn them into a compound path.

It’s not absolutely necessary to make it into a compound path. If you just group the image and the rectangle, it would cut the same way. But it’s easier to see what your cut will look like if you use the compound path.

You could use that with vinyl as a stencil, but not with something like paper (unless you modify it some). The inner pieces would be separate little bits. It works with vinyl because you use transfer media to move it to your surface.

When creating mockups

This is a quick way to remove the background of an image so that you can layer it over another image without the white background showing. I’ll show you how to do this on some photographs later in the series. Here I did Trace and Detach with a Cameo to add it on the table.

Getting the inner pieces to cut

Let’s say you want to use Trace and Detach, but you want the internal parts to cut too. You can do a second regular Trace to get those. This is what you’d do if you wanted to do a Print and Cut of our lady on the bike and you want those spokes to cut out.

Be sure to read the next section on cut styles as well if you’re doing something like this.

Cut style with Trace and Detach

Trace and Detach has implications for cut styles and cut modes.

• In Simple mode, both background and image are on Cut. This is a change from earlier versions of the software. Even the outer edge of the rectangle of the background is a cut line.
  
• If you are cutting by line color, neither piece is set to cut because they don’t have a line color and clear line colors are by default set to No Cut. To make them cut in this mode, just give them a color or check the box.
  
• When you cut by fill color, both pieces are set to cut by default because they both have a fill. Don’t confuse the white background for a clear one — that’s different. They are both considered to have a pattern fill and therefore the box for them is on. The white background doesn’t look like a pattern, but it was originally a part of just a raster image which is just like a square filled with a printable pattern.
  
• If you cut by layer, both pieces would be in some layer. You would just decide if you want to cut the layer they are in.
  

If you’re going to do a Print and Cut, you can overlap the pieces and select Cut Edge on both in simple cut mode, or turn on AutoWeld in cut by line, fill or layer. The overlapping areas don’t cut, which is the purpose of using Cut Edge/AutoWeld.

Watch out for double cuts

Once you retrace the image to get inner pieces, you don’t need that raster image to cut anymore — even on a print and cut. You want its fill properties, not its cut properties. So you set that piece to No Cut. If you leave it on cut, both the regular traced piece and that trace and detached piece cut right on top of each other, but they probably aren’t exact. That makes a mess.

The other option on that is to release the compound path on the traced piece, delete the outer part of that, remake the compound path and group it with the trace and detached piece. But, yeah, that’s way too much trouble.

More practice

For more practice, you can use Trace and Detach on the other images we’ve used in this lesson. The fancy shield would be particularly useful for figuring out the internal pieces. The others are all solid.

Adjusting for lighter colors

Remember how I said that Silhouette Studio doesn’t actually read colors but light vs. dark value? If you have a light color, you can adjust the Threshold in order to get those.

It’s important to understand the Trace filters in order to get good traced images. The Silhouette User’s Manual gives NO information on the filters and the website gives only a small bit that isn’t very helpful. Keep reading this series and I will explain all of them in detail.

Open the pink heart and draw the trace box around it. It’s a lighter color, so nothing turns yellow.

Why is that? The default light value on the Threshold filter is 45 — pretty much right in the middle of the light to dark value scale. At 0, it picks up the blackest of blacks. At 45, it picks up mid-range colors. If we take that Threshold up higher than 45, we tell the software to look for lighter values. That’s what we need to do here.

Adjusting the Threshold

Start by using the arrows to adjust it. That’s the easiest way to move it in small chunks which will help me point something out. Right when you hit 70, you should start to see a tiny bit of yellow.

At 74, it’s almost filled in.

 At around 76, it’s a nice solid fill that would give us a good trace.

Yep, the difference between the Threshold set to 70 and 76 is small. A tiny adjustment can make a big difference. Notice that I zoomed in so that I could see better. That’s usually pretty helpful.

Now move it to 99 and check the edges.

It’s starting to get fuzzy, because we’re telling the software to keep going and it says, “Well, maybe there’s a bit outside those edges there.”

If you went all the way to 100, you’d definitely see that.

You will almost never use the Threshold at 0 or 100.

This is why we want to start with images that are good resolution. The clearer the image, the easier it is for the software to see where the color stops. The easier that is, the cleaner the trace line will be.

So, go back to a good area around 80 and do a trace there. That’s a pretty good heart. In our next lesson, I’ll show you how to make it even better.

More practice

Let’s look at the red heart again. Remember that we didn’t have to adjust the Threshold because it was past the mid range in darkness. If I took the Threshold DOWN this time, when I got to around 27 I’d lose the yellow. Play with that some.

For extra practice, you can use the stork and teddy bear images because they are lighter colors. That’s in honor of my new baby grandson :). Also, play around with adjusting the Threshold on some of the black images and notice where you might start to lose some yellow.

Using AutoTrace on PNG images

There is a new option in the newest versions to set PNG images to AutoTrace. What this does is do the trace for you automatically as the software opens the image. As with Trace and Detach, you need to understand the implications.

• If you set AutoTrace to off, the software adds a white background to the PNG as it opens it. Normally, they have a clear background. This would then affect how you might use it on a Print and Cut. **This is something that MIGHT change in future software updates.**
• This works pretty easily on a black and white image, or on one with colors similar in tone that are all separated by blank space.
• If the colors are light, they can blend into the background and get cut off — they are outside the cut border. I’ll show that in more detail when we start doing traces of images with multiple colors.
• On images with multiple colors that are touching one another (refer to Lesson 1 if you need to remember what those are), the software AutoTrace is going to do something similar to a Trace and Detach — cut away the clear background and delete it, leaving a cut line around what it determined to be the outer edge of the image. The difference is that it will give it a red cut line so that (a) you see it and (b) it’s set to cut as it has both line color and fill color.

I’m going to recommend you keep AutoTrace OFF for right now as we learn how to do traces manually. I’ll show you more about it in future lessons.

Up Next

If you’d like, you can find more simple images to practice your tracing with. Just look for the same types of images we’ve been using.

In our next lesson, we’ll look at tracing simple images with different colors, look at how to separate the traced image into pieces, and gain a better understanding of groupings vs. compound paths. We’ll also learn how to clean up the lines of a traced image with a single click.