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Image Tracing in Affinity Designer?


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I am pretty novice in vector desing but this feature i really needed and used in Adobe Illustrator. And i just downloaded a demo of Affinity Designer  and cannot find it?

How to do this is Affinity Designer?

 

P.s. Manual tracing is out of question at the moment! I need automatic similarly to High Fidelity photo in Adobe Illustrator.

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1 hour ago, Callum said:

There is no automatic tracing in Affinity Designer I'm afraid. This is something that may be added in a future version :)

 

C

Yes, that very sad. I really need that feature. So un till then i guess i will stick to Adobe Illustrator. 

 

Any idea when it comes to Affinity Desgner?

 

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11 minutes ago, ChrisP said:

Well you could always use Inkscape (free) to image trace and then bring it in to Affinity Designer

I do not trust free software because usually they are not the best quality! 

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1 hour ago, chilly7 said:

I do not trust free software because usually they are not the best quality! 

 

And yet there isn't anything to lose trying InkScape except a little time.

 

Or, because Serif has stated they only plan on releasing a trace routine if it meets expectations and is comparable to what can be considered the best, you could always go plunk down the cash for Vector Magic. At least it isn't free...

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1 hour ago, chilly7 said:

I do not trust free software because usually they are not the best quality! 

Then you should not trust paid software like Affinity or many others either, because they include open source "backend" software code that is distributed under a variety of no-cost licenses. Inkscape is one of the many apps that uses the Potrace algorithm for auto-tracing -- if you would find that algorithm more worthy of your trust if you had to pay to use it, there are several paid apps that use it for that.

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On 12.09.2017 at 11:29 PM, MikeW said:

 

And yet there isn't anything to lose trying InkScape except a little time.

 

Or, because Serif has stated they only plan on releasing a trace routine if it meets expectations and is comparable to what can be considered the best, you could always go plunk down the cash for Vector Magic. At least it isn't free...

That is the case. I do not  want to lose time! I want to do many wonderful things!!! And time is a problem for me.

 

Adobe Illustrator is expansive for me so i am looking for alternative but with the best quality.

I do unprofitable work so i do not make money out of my work so that's is a problem for me to pay that much money out of Adobe subscription plan.

 

Who is Serif?

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On 13.09.2017 at 1:17 AM, R C-R said:

Then you should not trust paid software like Affinity or many others either, because they include open source "backend" software code that is distributed under a variety of no-cost licenses. Inkscape is one of the many apps that uses the Potrace algorithm for auto-tracing -- if you would find that algorithm more worthy of your trust if you had to pay to use it, there are several paid apps that use it for that.

Open souce is a good thing because it alows other developers to create addons to the vanilla version.

 

P.s. Free staff is usually a crap or at best not the best, however there are might be exceptions. For example all my art i do is totaly free. And i have spend alot of work to do that and i was trying to do it the best i can. I do not make any money out of it. But i just want to do something beautiful to the world.

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Just now, MEB said:

Serif is the company that develops the Affinity line of products (currently Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo).

Thank you.

 

Did there were mentioned any time line for image tracing?

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11 minutes ago, MEB said:

Hi chilly7,

No, there's no eta for the auto-trace functionality. It will be only released if/when the dev team is happy with its output/quality.

I see.

 

P.s. Hopefully it will be on pair or better then Adobe Illustrator!!!

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1 hour ago, chilly7 said:

P.s. Hopefully it will be on pair or better then Adobe Illustrator!!!

I have no direct experience with this, but some forum users have mentioned that Inkscape (which I believe uses Potrace as its auto-tracing engine) generally produces better results than Illustrator.

 

Personally, I have never found an app I can afford that provides an auto-trace function that outputs vectorized files formatted & layered in any way I would find very useful for my purposes. Usually, the raster image has either high enough pixel resolution to begin with that I can use it as is, or the resolution is too low to produce a version that looks good when vectorized & scaled up & added to my project, so I end up manually tracing it anyway.

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Hi, chilly7

 

You really might want to try Inkscape. I've used it on  Macs off and on for years. It must run under X11 windowing system developed for graphic display in Unix systems, so the performance is less than perfect, but acceptable. The interface is also somewhat clumsy. But all the functions I've tried worked well. I've had reasonably good results.

 

I haven't tried any color traces w. more than 16 colors, and the photos were carefully smoothed, unlike what is shown in the Illustrator tute. But the results still produced thousands of paths. For the kind of work I tend to do, deleting tiny specks of color, or tweaking hundreds of nodes to ensure nice smooth paths, is almost too much. I would find photo resolution traces almost useless. Why would I want to produce a vector image that is almost a big as the photo, and when enlarged, will have similar visually distracting detail.

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On 12/09/2017 at 9:04 PM, chilly7 said:

I do not trust free software because usually they are not the best quality! 

Did you pay for your web browser?

 

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  • 4 months later...

Actually you have to take some third party tool for tracing here, like for example:

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

Actually you have to take some third party tool for tracing here, like for example:

I understand, but Adobe Illustrator has it in the program. No need for third party apps.  Designer will be better with an image tracing persona.

Cheers

 

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2 minutes ago, AffinityAppMan said:

I understand, but Adobe Illustrator has it in the program. No need for third party apps.  Designer will be better with an image tracing persona.

Of course it would, but since it doesn't have one and you don't want to wait endlessly for an embedded one, you have to look around elsewhere if you need such functionality now and yet.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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  • 3 months later...

I understand this is an old thread, but I just tried to install Inkscape onto MacOS 10.11.6 (El Capitan) via Homebrew (command line) and would not recommend that route to MacOS users.

 

After issuing the command to install Inkscape, the computer downloaded about 50 dependencies but didn't finish with a working copy. There were about 5 errors, and I don't know enough about the process to try and troubleshoot or fix. Now I have a bunch of dependencies junking up my computer and no Inkscape.

 

I can whole heartily understand the OP's hesitation to use free software. Had I known I would end up filling my computer with a bunch of useless programs I would not have done this. Also, who knows if what was installed will cause issues later down the road. UGH!!!

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • Staff

Hi Jan Gaare,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
We do have plans to add a tracing tool assuming we are able to get the output quality we are aiming for. Meanwhile there's quite a few utilities you can use (some of them quite good) to trace images. You can then open the result file in Affinity and work from there.

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19 minutes ago, Jan Gaare said:

so without tracing it proves itself to not so usefull, no arrows is not esential, but no tracing, hopeless...

It is not hopeless unless you insist on doing everything in one app. If not, as has been mentioned many times in these discussions there are quite a few good alternatives, including several free ones, that can be used with Affinity Designer (& Photo) to provide that function.

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What is hopeless  is a tracing non optimized like  in that (and the narrator still calls it "successfully converted) video, that's useless. You can refine the vectorization in most softwares, but coming to a really elegant result takes almost the same trial and error time than the time used in just proper hand tracing.

Inkscape, with some research on your side (just find your ideal settings for most projects, i've used it for some fast silhouettes for 3D extrusions in Blender of imported as SVGs), as has one of the best tracers embedded, Potrace (more flexible in its command line form, tho, but harder to use for the average joe), and an easy UI for it inside Inkscape, is among the best options, and it is free. You will find your self tracing there and doing every thing else in AD, as, no offense to the great Inkscape, AD is quite superior.  Most work should not be based on auto tracing, for the usual design workload,  although there are very specific exceptions. If  your work is so much focused on that, I'd research heavily in the command line usage of Potrace.

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