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Vector Trace
It seems like I’m missing something in the instructions. You still have to carefully trace around an object by hand to get this to work? I figured it would be something akin to “magic wand” where you roughly define an area and let the software do the rest through adjustments of tolerance, etc.
The online example uses a bitmap, but I’m messing around with jpeg, targa, photoshop — all with well defined alpha channels (they’re logos), and I cannot seem to get the vector trace to give me a clean matching outline of the original image file.
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3 Replies
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Try this:
1. Load the image into the timeline and hide everything else so it’s just the image over alpha
2. Open the Vector Trace Palette from the Window menu and change the Trace Channel to Alpha
3. Select the Vector Trace Tool from the Tool window
4. Hold CTRL + Shift and drag a rectangular marquee around the image you’re tracing and you should have a decent trace. Depending on its complexity you may have to then clean up some of the points but that should get you going.
Good luck.
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Flip,
Yep. That did it, although I’m a little disappointed in the accuracy of the trace even using alpha. Do you have the default tolerance, threshold and pre-blur values for the trace menu? I’ve totally messed around with mine and can’t seem to get them back to “default”.
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Tracing really depends on the media. Complex shapes will most likely need some cleaning done to them but this true of almost every tracing tool I’ve used.
Here are the defaults:
Tolerance = 1.00
Threshold = 50.00
Pre-Blur Amount = 5.00You can always delete the BorisRED4.0.ini file in the Windows directory to restore RED to it’s true factory defaults. This will reset all preferences so you may want to backup the file so you can go restore your settigns if need be.
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