How to trace an image in Linearity Curve

High-quality image tracing was once reserved for professional, seasoned graphic designers.  Their advanced design skills required expensive and complex vector design software, with advanced design tools on powerful machines, to turn photography into illustration and design elements.

In Adobe Illustrator—a popular graphic design software known for its powerful vector drawing tools—the tracing process is a manual, multi-part exercise using an Illustrator document that may take significant effort and time depending on the complexity of your image. 

With starter packages available for free, Linearity Curve makes it possible for even the most beginner designer to craft stunning vector images from raster images. With its integrated Unsplash library of millions of free stock images, Linearity is supercharging a new wave of empowered designers across the globe with its game-changing offering.

Imagine the endless possibilities when complex images can be transformed into impactful illustrations with a few clicks. 

In this guide, we'll show you how to:

• Use Linearity Curve's Auto Trace feature
• Auto Trace an image step-by-step
• Give tips on choosing types of images and experimenting with the images and pictures you've traced.

Understanding the basics of image tracing

Image tracing converts raster images (digital photos and detailed graphics with a fixed pixel number, often in .jpeg, .png, or .gifformats) into vector format, allowing infinite scalability and versatility without compromising image quality due to the mathematical formula inherent in vectors.

So, by vectorizing, you can maintain the essence of your original image while gaining the freedom to resize, recolor, and adapt it for a wide range of applications. In case you're still confused about the difference between a raster and a vector image, here's a table to help:

In the past, using the traditional method, images would need to be outlined using hundreds of clicks to create a discernable shape. But with Linearity Curve’s Auto Trace feature, you can now convert raster images into vector shapes quickly. 

Whether you're an illustrator looking to bring hand-drawn sketches into multifunctional digital illustrations, a designer striving for clean and scalable graphics, or a marketer looking to improve and customize your visual content, the multifunctionality of image auto-tracing is the tool you've been looking for. 

Let's get started tracing an image together. 

Prepare your image for tracing

Let's start with the image you will trace. If you're looking for clean lines, ensure that the quality of the source image is high-resolution, clear, and well-defined. Your final traced image will only be as good as the source, so spend some time getting the best-quality image possible.

If this is your first time using Curve’s image trace tool, look for a picture with few colors and simple shapes. We also recommend choosing photo images in the .jpg or .png formats to trace.

If you use an uncompressed photo file (.raw, .tiff, and other formats) and convert it to vector format, you'll have a large file that can become challenging to manage. This is why the compressed raster image formats .jpg and .png work better for Auto Trace.

In this tutorial, we’ll trace a .jpeg image of a beach umbrella sourced from the Unsplash library. 

Image source: Unsplash

Create a new document in Curve

In Linearity Curve, start a new project, and select the Artboard size from the templates of size settings that suit your outcome. Remember, the digital format allows for flexibility in layout and design, so feel free to experiment with advanced settings and custom sizes.

Crop and adjust

Before you hit the trace button, cropping and adjusting the source image to eliminate unnecessary elements or distractions will go a long way toward speeding up your image trace process.

Focus your crop on the parts of the entire image you want for your design, and even adjust brightness, contrast, or color balance to emphasize the parts you want to keep. 

Remove your image’s background

You may want to remove the background from your source image to isolate the subject. This is particularly useful when tracing objects or people. Linearity Curve offers an accurate Background Removal feature that makes achieving clean and precise traces easier. 

Access the Auto Trace panel

Now that you've prepared your raster image for tracing, you would typically need to manually trace the image using the Pen Tool to turn it into a vector. The Auto Trace tool on Linearity Curve does this automatically in vectorizing our image. 

The Auto Trace panel is a content-aware menu, meaning it will only be visible when an image is selected. The panel will appear automatically at the top of the Style Tab.

You have three Auto Trace mode options in the Auto Trace Panel:

1. The Photography Mode is for turning your photos into painting-like portraits.
2. The Sketch Mode converts your sketches into vectors in seconds.
3. The Illustration Mode to vectorize your illustrations.

Adjust the trace complexity and path size

Because we're working with a photo, we’ll use the Photography Panel dropdown menu, which contains two settings sliders that enable you to set the number of paths and the path size:

• Complexity. This slider adjusts how many paths your vectorized image will have. By adjusting the slider, you can adjust the percentage of paths your vectorized image will contain. A lower value will give you a more abstract result, and a higher value will result in a more detailed path.
• Minimum Path Size. This slider sets the threshold for your path size. Higher values create longer paths between points, resulting in a less detailed image. A lower value will generate shorter paths between points, producing greater detail.

With our 4.8.2 update, we included even more options for the optimal tracing results of your sketches:

• The Simplify toggle is ideal for tracing an image with simple, uncomplicated shapes. When Simplify is toggled on, Auto Trace will create significantly fewer nodes in the resulting traced shape.
• With the Ignore White feature, you can define whether Auto Trace creates vector shapes from your input image's white areas. When Ignore White is turned on while in Sketch Mode, all the white areas of the source image will be erased.
• The Keep Source Image toggle will define whether the original image will be kept after finishing the tracing process. If the original image is saved, it will be organized below the newly traced image in the layer hierarchy.

Auto Trace your image

Now, you're ready to tap the Auto Trace button. Give it a few seconds to process the original source image according to your settings, and you'll have a high-quality vector image.

Edit the traced image

After converting your image into vector shapes, you can edit the paths using Linearity's vector editing features. We corrected a few wonky pieces of the umbrella base that got lost in tracing the reference image, dragging the path points to meet up with one another into more straight lines.

We didn't make anything too straight to preserve the painterly feeling of the illustration, but this is up to you. So, take a bit of time to play with the additional line segments and curved lines to create a more accurate vectorized version.

You can also explore other artistic effects, like recoloring options, to create a colorful design. Or add a stroke of black outlines to create the appearance of a freehand outline in your panel menu's fill and stroke sections. 

Once your image trace is complete, save it in a format that suits your needs. You can download it for personal use or share it with your team for collaborative inspiration.

How to trace an image using the Pen Tool

As great as it is, image tracing doesn't have to be limited to the Auto Trace tool. If you want to get a bit deeper, let's briefly look at more manual Linearity Curve techniques that offer more detailed refinement to your traced images, adding a more developed artistic technique to your traced images.

Combining Auto Trace and manual tracing

Begin with the Auto Trace tool to quickly capture the basic outlines of your image. You may notice details that have yet to be included in the AI-generated image that you want to restore or enhance.

Switch to manual tracing mode to refine and enhance these details by using the Pen Tool to add them back into the traced image.

With the Pen Tool, you can define anchor points and adjust the curves associated with these anchor points by manipulating two handles connected to each anchor.

It allows you to create straight or curved paths that can be used as independent segments or complete shapes. It's the most direct way to create vectors in Curve.

Explore the future of vector design

Check out our complete Auto Trace guide to learn how to get the most out of this powerful Linearity Curve feature. 

The possibilities to create vector masterpieces with raster source images in Curve are limitless. Are you ready to try new and innovative graphic design software to bring your images to life?

Frequently asked questions