Trace Tool Techniques

The Trace Tool is probably the most underrated tool in the whole FreeHand™ suite. It's extremely powerful for creating editable vector art from bitmap images in generating logos or specialized illustrations. You can literally recreate logos pulled from the web in order for them to work well in high-end print work (though you should get permission from the owners of the copyrighted materials before doing such a thing).

Below I show a couple of techniques to really get an idea how useful the Trace Tool can be in converting bitmaps into vectors.

Version: 7 and above

First lets get familiar with the Trace Tool. When you double-click on the tool you will get a dialog box like shown at right. Here you can choose the Color mode (Colors/Grays) and how many color levels you'd like to have in the final traced image (2-256). You can pick either High, Normal or Low resolution depending on how much detail you want to have. The Path conversion comes in many different flavors; Outline, Centerline, Centerline/Outline or Outer edge. I will demonstrate a couple of these below. You can also set how tight or loose you want to trace. The higher the setting, the more detail you'll get in the final traced image. Be aware that if you use the tightest setting on a highly detailed bitmap image, it may take a minute or two to finish. The Noise tolerance setting is used to determine if you want to include stray pixels in the bitmap image. The higher the setting, the less it will pick up on stray or unwanted pixels. The lower you set it, the more detail it will pick up in the final traced image. Finally, the Wand color tolerance (FH 9 only) let's you adjust how many color levels the magic wand will pick up.

People often asked me where I got the font for the title graphic I use for this site. Well as far as I know it's called Vonnes and I'm assuming it's an internal font that Macromedia uses for all of it's corporate identity materials. Since I didn't have immediate access to Vonnes and wanted to get this site up and running quickly, I pulled a GIF file of the FreeHand title (shown above). First I set up my Trace Tool by double-clicking on the tool to get the options dialog and I set the following values: Color mode: 2 / Colors Resolution: High Path conversion: Outline Trace conformity: 10 Noise tolerance: 20

After entering those values, I proceeded to trace the bitmap by click+dragging over the part of the bitmap I want. The final trace is shown above. As you can see, it adds quite a bit of extra points to the lines especially in curvy areas. You can further simplify this by using the Simplify Operation (or under Modify -> Alter Path -> Simplify). By using the Outline Path conversion, this ensured me that it was going to include the knockouts for the letters R, A and D. If I had used the Edges only option, I would only have gotten the outer edges of the letters. Also, by only using 2 colors this not only sped up the tracing process, but only gave me an outline to work with. Now I can use this fully editable line art for creating other things like my Flash title for example. This is a great way of creating custom fonts from a scan of your own handwriting and later importing into Fontographer.

My next example will show how well the Trace Tool works with highly detailed images. Above I chose an image of my wife Nicole and I at our favorite getaway, Long Beach Washington. Below are various examples of the many, many options you can use in creating some interesting art from a bitmap option.

Color mode: 24 / Grays Resolution: High Path conversion: Outline Trace conformity: 0 Noise tolerance: 20	Color mode: 16 / Colors Resolution: Low Path conversion: Outline Trace conformity: 0 Noise tolerance: 0 Notice here how much more detail was picked up in our faces with the Noise tolerance level turned all the way down.
Color mode: 2 / Colors Resolution: High Path conversion: Centerline/ Outline Trace conformity: 10 Noise tolerance: 0	Color mode: 256 / Colors Resolution: High Path conversion: Outline Trace conformity: 10 Noise tolerance: 0 With these settings, I got the most detail out of the original image. Use caution when going for this kind of detail. It took my 233 Mhz G3 a total of 5 minutes to render the traced image and it will make a very large final file size.

As you can see in the above examples, you can really create arty illustrations from a bitmap image using the Trace Tool. Even better, now the images are editable vector art so you can apply different vector effects such as blends and distortions to the art.

The best way to get a feel for how powerful and useful the Trace Tool can be is to experiment with many options like I showed you above. There is also another tip in the Tips Archive called Creating a Clipping Path using the Trace Tool that demonstrates yet another useful way of using the tool. You will definitely come to love this tool and use it more often than you may think.