Hi, I am Sandy and I am fairly new to Inkscape. I have been using it to convert graphics to vectors for about a year, but am now looking to have it do a lot more. I have been watching tutorials till my eyes cross. I can't find the answer to this one thing I want to try. I have a picture of the ghostbusters ghost in the circle, it has a black background. I want to cut, in vinyl, just the ghost out but all I want is the black outline.It will be put onto a white door panel of a car. How can I make an outline of it? If there is a tutorial on it, I will be happy to watch it but I don't even know what the technique to do that would be called to find the tutorial. Any help would be appreciated.

Welcome Sandy!

Hhmm....well, I'm guessing that the "picture" is a raster format image? If that's the case, you'll have to convert to vector. Since you didn't say how you've been converting raster to vector in the past, I'm not sure if you used Path menu > Trace Bitmap, or another tracing tool. But there may be a couple of ways to go for this task.

You could use Trace Bitmap to convert to vector. After that, you'll have to isolate the particular paths that comprise the shape you need. Then it may be as simple as removing the fill and adding stroke. Or you may need to do a little node editing to combine subpaths first, depending on the result of the trace.

The other way is to trace "by hand" using Pen/Bezier or Pencil/Freehand tool. If I recall that Ghostbusters image, the ghost is a fairly simple shape. Doing it by hand may well be faster than fooling around with a trace and node editing.