Then we import our photo (PNG) without the background from our folder into Inkscape.

First we want to get rid of the photo background by using Inkscape or better GIMP and then exporting the photo to a directory (a folder).

It doesn't touch the colored areas that otherwise might look bad as semi-transparent.In this video we learn how to turn a photo into a black and white vector graphic. I select the one color with color matching tool, so a kind of a mask is selected. The last technique is not a hack because it's way too much work involved.īTW, when I make transparent images I don't convert just all image.

For more detailed images I just redrawn them in Inkscape having the original image as the background layer to later remove.

It works great with curvy, not too much detailed images. If you think GIMP is powerful for a free program, try Inkscape, it's just amazing what it can do and the most important aspect of it it's pretty easy compared to similar commercial programs like Adobe Illustrator. How? Just look for the mentioned options in GIMP and Inkscape. You save the target image as SVG and as the acronym says - it's scalable. This makes nice and smooth transparency, then there is another step - vectorization in a program like Inkscape. One is converting the white background to alpha. Oh, I could get a better photo myself if I drove over.not gonna happen, though, because that's time and money I won't get back. I also keep an executable for Waifu2x for postage stamp sizes photos that people want to use in much larger ads. In my experience it works better when it's higher resolution aka something that's already good enough to use as-is. Attempting a cleanup with upscaling, gauss blur, and curves can save labor.Īlso yeah I see other people talking about auto conversion of rasters to vectors. In other words, it's extra labor to recreate a logo. And if you're lucky, the new business will actually pay their bill. If you spend more than a few minutes on this one ad, you're wasting time, and if you bother to recreate their logo, you're probably spending more time recreating the logo than on any other part, and there's a good chance that if this is their first ad, it'll probably also be their last. Their ad is probably two columns by 4 inches. Most the time it'll be one of two things: a business card that, if you're lucky, will be simple colors but probably is shiny ink on a black background with a staple through it, or the logo they attach to emails. Here's what happens: your customer provides a logo.

Very pixelated image to vector inkscape