In this video we will take a multicolored logo and PowerTRACE it to
simplify it to one color, where it can be used for screen printing, vinyl cutting
or other graphic output. Before we get started, if you're watching this video on
YouTube you'll find a link in the description below that will take you to
our tutorial page on the Discovery Center. Here you can download a written
copy of this tutorial and follow along. Let's get started.
Customers looking for artwork to be screen-printed, embroidered or used for
signage will usually supply a low resolution JPG but a vector file is
always preferred. To resolve this you can PowerTRACE JPGs and convert them to
vector right inside CorelDRAW. Some of the key factors in getting clean, high
quality output with no or little manipulation after PowerTRACE are: 1. Start
with a high resolution image if at all possible. This will result in a better
trace. 2. Avoid texture fills and gradient fills if at all possible.
These can be challenging when tracing, solid colors just trace better. 3. Avoid
fine detail because it will result in many objects that once traced, can be
it difficult to clean up after tracing. Let's get started by clicking File > New
to create a new document. We'll choose a letter size. The document size
is not critical to this project. Click OK and now let's go retrieve our logo by
clicking File >Import and go get the logo. Click Import and then when you come in
you can hit space bar and that will land it on the page in the size that it
was created. Now let's add a rectangle behind our logo so we can see
where the white is, and if there are any other colors or things like
that in the logo. So let's double-click our rectangle. What that's going to do is
create a shape the whole size of our page, and now we can come over here and
click a color and set it to a color so we can see the white. So now you see
there's white on the middle and white on the border. Now we're ready to PowerTRACE.
Let's select our logo and analyze what we have here before we get
started. It's an RGB logo and it's 200 dpi, which is a good resolution for
tracing. Now we can go up to Bitmaps > Outline Trace and choose
Clipart. It will yield a good trace. Let it process.
The top part is your original and the bottom part is your trace. Let's
analyze the two to see how close we came. Everything is looking pretty good,
other than it didn't trace the tiny little line in the banana but we don't
really need that for this so we're not going to worry about that now. We're
going to look at some of our options. The Remove Background option is
already turned on so where the checker board pattern is, that's
where it already removed the background. We will also tell it to remove
that color background image color from the entire image and if we click that, you can
see the white disappears so that's good. we got rid of that color simplifying it
down and we're going to leave these other options on.
Let's go to the Colors tab and we're going to manipulate the colors. If
you wanted a full color version of this logo you could click OK right now and
you have your full color, vectorized logo but we're going to simplify them all down
to one color so it's ready to be a single screen-printed image or a single
embroidered image as one color. The first thing we're going to do is
merge our black. Click on a black and you can see these diagonal
lines, which indicate the selected color. Hold Ctrl on your keyboard and
select the other black, then click Merge. This will merge those two blacks
into one. The next color is this green outside border. We can make that
black and merge it with the black. Select it first and then we can
click the Edit button and make it black by selecting the black in your
palette. Click OK. Now we can merge again. Have that one selected, hold down
Ctrl and merge that one as well. We're almost there, the colors are
disappearing slowly but surely. Now we need to merge all
of these colors that are left, because we're going to
make those show through to the checker boards and we don't want solid banana or
a solid black tomato so we're going to make those be white.
First we had need to merge them and then we can edit them to white
and then we can merge it with the original white. So hold down Ctrl and click Merge.
Select the two whites and click Merge and here's our one color logo.
We're ready to click OK and see our PowerTRACE results.
If we pull it down on the page, we can see our black logo, and if i
zoom in to for comparison we can see clean, crisp lines on our vector image.
Let me show you in Wireframe quickly. Go to View > Wireframe.
There's our JPEG that was pixels, you can see the pixels, and our trace is
clean, crisp lines. If I go back out of Wireframe we can enlarge our vector
logo nice and big, as huge as we want and those lines are still crisp and clean.
If I zoom in on the original JPG
you'll see that it's jagged and it's not clean. If you zoom in on
the same area on the vector logo, it's nice and crisp and clean and ready to
print for any type of output. Thank you for watching. If you're watching this
video on YouTube, you'll find a link in the description below that will take you
to our tutorial page on the Discovery Center. Here you can download a written
copy of this tutorial and the sample logo to follow along. You will
also find other helpful tutorials on CorelDRAW.