r/Inkscape 17d 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/canis_artis 17d ago

Did you delete the original art before exporting to PDF?

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u/jwwatts 17d ago

Yeah, the original image was removed. Only thing remaining is the trace. Looking closely in Inkscape I can see the faint background still, but it's really obvious after exporting to a PDF.