How do I clean up hand drawn images in inkscape? Thank You to who ever can help!

Sherry

What do you mean by "clean up" and "hand drawn"? What exactly are you working with? You might be looking for the trace bitmap feature or perhaps simplify.

I'm scanning my hand drawn images and want to use inkscape to make sure all of the corners and such are perfect and very clean. Is there a way to do this with inkscape? I hope I explained this ok. I'm a newbie to all of this and my brain is on overload! lol!

Sherry

sherryscraps wrote:I'm scanning my hand drawn images and want to use inkscape to make sure all of the corners and such are perfect and very clean. Is there a way to do this with inkscape? I hope I explained this ok. I'm a newbie to all of this and my brain is on overload! lol!

If you're new, my initial concern might be that you don't understand the nature of Inkscape - that is, that it is vector. It doesn't really clean up pencils but it can convert them to vector using "Trace bitmap" (linked above) to create an ink-like version of your pencils. This is what I did to get the black lines for http://microugly.deviantart.com/art/Sar ... 8-43467300 - unfortunately the artist who provided the pencils for you to compare has deleted them. Is that what you are looking to do?

I do it like this (result|result with viewBox). The upper row is Photoshop and the lower one is Inkscape. If you want to try that blue filter stuff do some tests beforehand (E.g. I picked the CC5000 pencil).

That reminds me, I do have an example of pencils to vector...

Left: Original Pencils
Centre: Edits in a Photoshop. Involved adjusting the brightness and contrast to strengthen the lines - I manually erased some of the shading.
Right: Vector created using "Trace Bitmap" in Inkscape.

A feature that might clean up images a bit (it removes dust and speckles from the image, cures frazzled lines and "holes" in lines that are typial for pencil drawings) is the "suppress speckles" feature of the "trace bitmap" function. You might want to be careful wih this feature, though: It removes all details below the selected size.

Hi,

I am a newbie to Inkscape. I have a question similar to sherryscraps.
I have several sketches drawn in pencil and graphite. They are basically outlines with minor shading.
I want to sort of combine all the elements into one big picture and want to create a silhouette for the whole image.
So basically, I want to edit my pencil sketches digitally to enhance them and modify them.
So, here's my list of queries -

1) In what format should I have my images? Will pdf. work or does it have to be jpeg?
1) Can this be done only by creating vectors for each sketch?
2) Will creating vectors be possible for some sketches that maybe having discontinuous lines (the charcoal and pencil has spotty and discontinuous texture)?
3) Can i 'fill in' the drawing (to give the silhouette effect) as well as have pencil shading effects in the digital drawing?

microUgly wrote:That reminds me, I do have an example of pencils to vector...

Left: Original Pencils
Centre: Edits in a Photoshop. Involved adjusting the brightness and contrast to strengthen the lines - I manually erased some of the shading.
Right: Vector created using "Trace Bitmap" in Inkscape.

@microugly - I got a fair idea of how to go about it from what you have posted. Still if you can give in some additional inputs for my query.

Thanks in advance to everyone

Hi tagg,

With inkscape you can create sharp graphics -with manual tracing.
For example look at Dillerkind's image pool.

1. Choose the format that suits your needs.
   Pdf is good for printing. For displaying it as embedded on a webpage it is hardly seen.
   Pdf's can contain vector and raster elements too just as svg-s.
   Your scanned drawing is in a raster format itself. If you make a pdf copy of it with a pdf printer, the image will get jpeg compressed, which is lossy. And, it may slice up the embedded raster image as well.
   Jpeg is a lossy format.
   By saving at effectively no compression, you would end up with a larger file then a png which is lossless.
   So if you are not trying to save bandwidth on a site, you better use png.
   For importing into inkscape, png format works fine.
   
2. You can import more raster images to inkscape, thus it is not necessary to trace each sketch in a different svg.
   To my experience large raster images can crash inkscape though.
   If you import more images, maybe work with layers and hide those not in use.
   
3. Manual tracing can cover everything. If you are into details, autotrace is not your tool.
   
   
4. A pencil shading effect? If that is similar to the charchoal texture you wanted to get rid of, then it all seems to be a bit pointless. For making that look you can use filters.
   http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=13648#p52873
   http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=8968#p33276

Good luck!