Feb 06 2009
Corel Power Trace : Tracing logos is now a child’s play
CorelDraw has comes a long way since its very early days as what i remember, have worked on Corel draw 5.0 some 10 years ago. Now as most of us having Coreldraw X4 which gives us quite unique and very effective way to layout designing with several enhanced features in which Power Trace added, is most favorable feature I found. Now days for the work of Screen Printing it is quite very difficult to draw each and every logo we have to used. As most of them we received from the clients is printed material through which we have to design the layout. Even if we scan those logos or materials on a very high resolution though it looks very odd to use them as it is, as this cause several printing problems and quality seems to very bad. So to resolve this problem a lot of us redesign these logo from the scanned one. But if you are using Coreldraw you may have heard of Corel Trace comes bundeled with the earlier version, used to trace bitmap images but with in current release version it has opted as a new feature with in CorelX4. With this feature included you just not only found it to save your time to redraw scanned logos or artwork but also it’s performance is quite acceptable. You can find this toolbar within corel from the menu bar as shown below.
or from the Toollbar Menu
First of all before i tell how to use it let me tell about its all features it have. From with in the menu you will a Quick Trace, Center Line trace and Outilne Trace which have a submenus Line Art, Logo, Detailed Logo, Clipart, Low Quality Images and High Quality Images.
Quick Trace : This mode of Corel Power trace is very effective when we have a sharp bitmap (mainly a monochrome or two color bitmap) and is very fast as it uses default feature set by Corel team. If you have to trace a logo you may check this feature first and if you satisfied then there is no need to manually tracing using other option available. Try to use the advanced feature when you becomes are not satisfied with quick trace.
Note: But before tracing you should scan your document at 300 DPI, more of it may cause your system slow and a low scan result in low quality when you trace it. Sometimes we found even 300dpi result in very heavy file consuming a lot time and if this situation comes try reducing its DPI.
Center Line Tracing : This feature is fro them who draws a lot of line work like illustration or map designing. As it does tracing bitmap by deciding where a line may be and ignoring all colors. As shown below. The result we found is only a line work in black color and with none background.
Outline Trace : Now it comes the most important part of Power trace in terms features it have. In which line art and Logo having the least feature and used for the logos which having a minimum details and very least colors While the Detailed Logo is used for which having a sharp image and fine details. With the clipart option provided is used for the clipart images which have a multiple colors details and fine details. But for screen printing jobs what i think Detailed logo is the best option to choose from. It gives you a lot of options and features from which results can be enhanced.
From the picture above the first picture is original bitmap and second one is result found after tracing. Note here that you can use tool to check your trace result for better settings. From the box 1 marked above you can choose from option outline or center-line and bitmap settings and as i have said earlier Detailed logo is the best settings. Box no. 2 is the most important settings to trace a bitmap logo in which you can adjust detail of your logo a higher detail settings will look for more colors while lower setting will left some color details from the scanned logo. Smoothness is set reduce the zigzag from the traced result while Corner smoothness is somehow never used at higher levels as it removes the naturelity of curves.And third window is used for the color settings which color you think is the background color so that it does not trace for that color and some other settings which seems to be very often use.
Beside these if in case if you want to change the default setting of Powertrace you can found it from The Tools >>Option Menu and then as shown in picture below. But i should recommend you that before you change any default settings you should made it clear that what affect it produce.
