hello all. i am new to the graphic art world and need some help. i have coreldraw X3, i need to find the quickest way to turn my jpegs and/or bitmaps into vector art. now, i do the trace thing. line art, detailed art, and edit bitmap. the problem is is that when i trace, the image is distorted and looks like a kindergarten kid drew it. i want the exact image. even when i draw it and scan it in, i still cannot seem to get the exact image. then i am stuck messing with the “nodes” (let’s hope that that is the right word for what i am talking about) to straighten out everything, mind you, most of the lines i am straightening are curves, etc. ie. - pictures of floral designs i drew for a shirt. and yes, i am screen printing shirts.
if anyone can help me find a quicker way to do this, i would fall in love.
my experience with coreldraw is limited as personally i use adobe illustrator but in any case in both application there is a trace tool for simpler shapes to trace, but I never had success with this feature. The most cleanest and easiest way to trace a bitmap shape is to lock it down, fade it’s opacity a touch and then get busy with the pen tool. It’s takes more time than a automatic trace feature but it gives you the best results with clean curves and minimal points, usually the trace tools creates a insane amount of points which gives you a really hard time to edit the shape later.
If it’s just floral design you want to trace and still stuck on using trace you might have to look into preparing your bitmap to make it easier for the application to improve the trace results. Things like increasing contrast will help the results.
