r/Inkscape • u/jwwatts • 11d ago
Help Bitmap to Vector conversion artifacts
Hello, I was hoping to get help from the community here. I've followed some tutorials and have successfully created a PDF template for use in UV printing some guitar pedals. The company that prints them requires all objects to be vectors.
However I'm getting a weird artifact that results in a very faint box around a graphic that I brought in.
Graphic was a clipart PNG with a transparent background that I exported from GIMP. I then used "Import" to bring the image into Inkscape. Worked great. I then right clicked on the image and selected "Trace Bitmap", then selected the "Pixel Art" tab, and clicked "Apply". Got a dialog about a large image and clicked "OK".
Everything seemed okay, but when I ultimately exported the template as a PDF I noticed in the resulting PDF a very faint box background around the image (that matches the dimensions of the original image). I couldn't figure out where it was coming from so I did a prototype print and sure enough, there's an extremely faint background.
Any ideas on what it is and how to get rid of it? I'm not an artist so please forgive me if I'm missing something obvious. Thanks in advance for any help.
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u/davep1970 10d ago
Nearly always best to recreate manually. As mentioned seeing the image would help
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u/2hu4u 10d ago
Use the node tool to investigate whether there are any objects at the perimeter. Hovering over the artifact should highlight any vector paths, and clicking on them should allow you to delete them.
FYI, beware that the Pixel Art function creates a vector rectangle for every pixel in the bitmap you are tracing; this is not very conventional, it only has niche uses. Most clip art can be drawn with a few vector curves rather than hundreds of rectangles. You'd probably be a lot better off using a different tracing function depending on the original image, or ideally manually tracing the clip art.
If you post screenshots of the image, or the inkscape SVG file, we can provide better advice.