In the same vein as color reduction, you may need to clean your background even if it looks clear when zoomed out. Here, we have segmented to just 16 colors to illustrate the process. This will group areas of adjacent pixels of similar color/intensity into zones of color that best represent the original image. To produce areas of consistent color we can use the Scan2CAD Segmentation tool. If you zoom into the rectangular marked part of the image on the left, you can see that ‘areas’ of the same apparent color are made up of pixels of many similar colors. Learn more about editing raster colors here. Scan2CAD comes equipped with a function to reduce colors automatically – it will map all colors in an image to a number of colors of your choosing. For these images, reducing to black and white is likely to be inappropriate – instead, you should reduce the image to as few colors as possible whilst still maintaining the necessary detail of the image. Of course, it is common that you wish to keep multiple colors in your image (for example, maps containing several colors). Therefore, if you converted an image with complex colors into vector then you will have a large number of separate vector entities in your image, rather than smooth, solid lines, text, and polygons. Reducing colors is important because a conversion engine will detect every shade as a separate region in the image. This gives you the clearest possible contrast between the background (typically white) and the foreground (typically black – these being the elements you wish to vectorize).Ĭommonly, however, even an image that appears black and white may be formed of hundreds of colors on the grayscale. In an ideal world, all images that you’re converting to vector would be monocolor (black and white). If your image has a particularly low DPI you can increase the scale in Scan2CAD (by clicking Raster Effects > Scale). For best results, we recommend an image resolution of at least 300 dpi. The rule of thumb is that lines should be 4-5 pixels thick.
Secret tricks of the trade? Right this way… These guys have road-tested every tip on the Internet and even incorporated them into the Scan2CAD raster-to-vector conversion engine. Here, Scan2CAD’s in-house experts weigh in on the 10 most essential raster tips that everyone should master.
It is common that some level of ‘cleaning’ will be required for the raster image before you put it through the conversion process. While it can seem simple at times, it’s not really a one-click process. Raster-to-vector conversion is often billed as the easiest CAD process to learn – just upload the file, click a button and out comes the perfect vector drawing. Vectorization means your image becomes easily editable at any scale. It’s easy to see why people want to convert from raster to vector.