Blank spaces in vector line drawing fill in when divided

[squeezeboxpress]

Hi there! I drew a picture, scanned and vectorized it, cleaned up the edges, and everything was looking good until I tried to separate the different objects using layer>geometry>divide. Suddenly all the white spaces in my drawing filled in with black! I'm guessing it's because the insides of the lines were a shape instead of just empty background... Is there a way I can prevent/fix this without going back to the original scan and changing the tracing settings (I used inkscape for the tracing) so that I don't lose the work I did smootjing and fixing it up? Thanks.

 

The file attached has the original image below and a version I copied and then divided above.

[Callum]

Hi Squeezeboxpress,

 

Welcome to the forums

 

I can't see any file attached to this thread please could you try attaching it again?

 

C

[toltec]

2 hours ago, squeezeboxpress said:

Hi there! I drew a picture, scanned and vectorized it, cleaned up the edges, and everything was looking good until I tried to separate the different objects using layer>geometry>divide. Suddenly all the white spaces in my drawing filled in with black! I'm guessing it's because the insides of the lines were a shape instead of just empty background... Is there a way I can prevent/fix this without going back to the original scan and changing the tracing settings (I used inkscape for the tracing) so that I don't lose the work I did smootjing and fixing it up? Thanks.

 

The file attached has the original image below and a version I copied and then divided above.

 

Yes, you can can some very odd results with automating tracing programs.

 

What sometimes happens is that they put a solid background in black, then fit coloured shapes on top. Whereas, what we would want is a black outline around each shape. If you think about it, outlines are incredibly hard. They often overlap, or vary in thickness. To work that out is tough for a software tracer.

 

Not much you can do, tracing manually is much better. I have been trying for decades (literally) and only find tracing program useful for black and white images (I use inkscape). Even then you end up with far too many points. It takes as long to clean them up as it does to trace the image manually. At least you know when it should be an overlapping line.

 

The Pen Smart Mode in Affinity works quite well.

[lepr]

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[squeezeboxpress]

Oops! Here's what I was trying to attach. I appreciate what you're saying about automatic tracing, but it's something I did quite often in illustrator with no problems, so I know it's possible! I sometimes draw things much more complicated than this little scene, which would take forever to trace by hand, and I only ever work in black and white (in fact, another question I have is how to make sure something is 100% black without any C, M, or Y, so that my images can be made into a digital negative).

winter2017question.afdesign

[squeezeboxpress]

owenr, if I click on the inner shapes, subtract is greyed out and not clickable...

[lepr]

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[R C-R]

2 hours ago, squeezeboxpress said:

I sometimes draw things much more complicated than this little scene ...

Except that there is nothing simple about how Inkscape has vectorized it. Consider for instance the wreath, part of the path3764 [Curves] layer (note the plural). This is what it looks like with the Node Tool selected:

As @toltec mentioned, auto-tracing it produced hundreds of nodes in dozens of individual curves (one for each red node). path3764 also includes two sets of the books, pie, candles, notes, etc. groups, each with many nodes & curves. For example, this shows the nodes for just one of the candle groups:

It is actually 5 different curves, two for the outlines of the flame & candle, & three others for the interior parts subtracted from it. As you discovered, dividing path3764 into individual curves will just for this one part will produce 5 stacked black curves, so to 'unfill' it you will have to subtract each interior curve from its outline one, for example like in this one candle.afdesign file where I used compounds so you can see each shape's contribution to the object. It still has all those nodes, but at least each compound layer can be moved, resized, or whatever as an individual object.