Best way to improve and extract lines from a plan picture

[_sorted_]

Greetings.

New to Affinity and come from a Solidworks CAD background. Often have to deal with pictures/plans, like the attached, and then bring them once processed into Solidworks as background images. Bit like this.

So questions. I normally convert to black and white and then sharpen. New program new ideas, so any tips please to sharpen up the lines? Would it be best to buy Affinity Designer as it has vector capability that could make black lines crisper?

Thank you in anticipation.

[firstdefence]

I would go for Affinity Designer for drawing over images like this.

[Pšenda]

Or try vectorize this lines (for example https://www.vectorizer.io and many others), and editing, redraw something,..

[_sorted_]

Vectorizer. Been experimenting. Cool. Thank you. 

Also, Affinity Photo Workbook arrived and noticed the Pen tool and this seems to work well for vector lines. Is there anything that Designer gives me over and above the pen tool that can help?

NB: Workbook is terrific.

[Gabe]

Hi @_sorted_,

Welcome to the forums. 

Well, it's hard to say. Photo is mainly a photo editor with some vector tools, while Designer is a vector software with some photo tools. 

The best way to see would be to test them both. 

http://affin.co/designertrial

http://affin.co/phototrial

Thanks,

Gabe. 

[_sorted_]

Thanks. Trial downloading.

[gdenby]

Hi, _sorted_,

I messed w. trying to get something out of the image last night, just before bed. Posting after some sleep.

To preface, I find working w. this quality of image madening. It is heavily pixelated, and is blurred. Its the sort of heavily compressed stuff I've been working with for years, and have come to the conclusion that most of the time, it is faster to manually trace over the image, guessing at what some of the faint marks might be.

I use Designer a lot more than Photo, and while I suspect Photo would probably give better results if I had more skill, what I was able to get from Designer was about the same.

I decided to start w. a brightness/contrast adjustment. I turned the contrast way down, and found what I expected. Compression artifact debris all over.

I applied a threshold adjustment to get a more solid line from the grey mess. It was obvious some detail was being lost. And depending on the threshold setting, some lines were being merged in places.

So I started over, fiddled w. levels, added some blur to help reduce the jaggies, repeated the above, and got something I thought might be usable.

I opened the results in an inexpensive app called Image Vectorizer, and fiddled w. it bit map preprocessing features to try and clean the image some more. To a few tries, but I got something that looked OK.

Opened the .SVG in Designer, and saw that it was not very good. See the following, which includes a screen grab showing the hundreds of useless nodes that would have to be removed.

Just did a quick test. Removing excess nodes in one line to over a minute. Just redrawing w. pen to 7 seconds. And that after at least .5 hr cleaning the pixels up.

Moreover, the processed and vectorized image ends up being less accurate than what I can see from the original .jpg. So, just get handy w. the pen tool's  stroke widths and dash line options. Maybe set up some guides to make snapping easier.

 

[_sorted_]

"So, just get handy w. the pen tool's  stroke widths and dash line options." My conclusion also and bought designer and workbook.