Sometimes you will want to digitize a hand drawn image. This tutorial will show you how to do it quick n easy using the open source software - Inkscape.
Transcript (English)
Welcome to Internet and Technology, this is Cristian Herrera. I’m going to talk about how to trace a bitmap from a hand drawing into Inkscape and make it into an SVG—scalable vector graphics.
First, excuse the bad sound and lighting: I’m on my sailboat during the corona outbreak in 2020, without access to my office. Sometimes you want to digitize a hand drawing or a logo. Take a photo and make an SVG. I’ll show how to turn something that looks like this into something like this so you can do whatever with it. The drawing was sent by a friend—a “don’t touch your face” meme.
Start Inkscape (open source; I’m on Arch Linux). Import the PNG, embed it, and center it. If you resize with Shift you’ll ruin the aspect ratio; stretching can be useful (make the character fatter or skinnier), but I usually hold Control to keep proportions and scale to the size I want.
Select the image, choose Trace Bitmap. You see a live preview of the bitmap you’ll produce. Adjust brightness: too little and you catch nothing; too much and everything is black. Find a sweet spot. You can use edge detection or quantization, but for this hand-drawn graphic pen sketch brightness cutoff works well. Click OK, close the window, and you’ll see arrows to grab the original PNG and separate it from the traced vector. Now you’ve created a vector graphic from the original image; you can scale it up or down without pixelation.
Next, color it. Use the bucket or pencil to fill areas—make the dog brown or red, give it a golden necklace with the eyedropper. Add shapes: a little white star near the dog’s head. Since it’s vector you can zoom in/out forever, tweak corners, swirl it, recolor (blue star, white star, whatever). Very useful when creating a logo without a drawing board: hand-draw, import to Inkscape, trace to SVG, then keep editing in any tool. Printers want SVG; they’ll import it into Adobe Illustrator too.
That’s it for today. If you like this, please like/subscribe and leave questions or suggestions. Upcoming: an installation video for Manjaro (I recently installed Manjaro for my girlfriend; easy Arch-like setup), internet marketing, tech topics like Linux/OSs. Welcome to the channel—have a very nice day. Bye!