Getting a good scan from a small bitmap

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Phil
Vectric Wizard
Posts: 3025
Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2005 10:56 pm
Location: Pittsfield, MA

Getting a good scan from a small bitmap

Post by Phil »

I needed a heraldic lion for a recent project. The most suitable image I was able to find was too small to scan well enough with the Trace Bitmap tool. It was also too complex to manually trace, I could have but it would have taken a lot of time. I opened up a word processor and inserted the lion image into the document and printed the page. The quality of the print was very good. Then I scanned the lion at a high resolution, 600 DPI, and save it as a BMP. Next I brought the BMP into Aspire and used the Trace Bitmap tool to convert the image to a vector. The process worked very well.
The preview is at 6" x 6". It needs a little work but I am very happy with it.

Phil
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Lion preview.jpg

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martin54
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Re: Getting a good scan from a small bitmap

Post by martin54 »

Just to add to what you have said Phil, if you are printing bitmaps & then scanning them there are other things you can often do which can help, most scanning software has filters that allow you to exclude some of the unwanted dots (or noise) that you often get with low quality images, you can also tippex out any parts of the image you don't want rather than scan & then try to remove :lol: :lol:
If you play about with the scanners filters these tippexed out bits can be completely removed.

Something else that people often make a mistake with is that they size the bitmap before they trace it, enlarging a bitmap reduces the resolution so you are always better to trace your bitmap at it's original size & then enlarge the vectors to the required size.

If you can then it is often best to make some changes to low resolution bitmaps before you import them for tracing, I use dedicated software that I have as a signmaker to increase the resolution of bitmaps but most photo editing software will contain filters that will do it, guessing even the free software will have some way to do it even if the results are a bit limited. There are a lot of other things that you can do using photo editing software which will help you achieve a better trace but that is a whole new subject on it's own :lol: :lol:

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Adrian
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Re: Getting a good scan from a small bitmap

Post by Adrian »

It's available here as a full vector - https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-fre ... ctor-66180

Looks like a few people have removed parts of the watermark from the preview image and put it on various sites as a bitmap.

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highpockets
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Re: Getting a good scan from a small bitmap

Post by highpockets »

I use Inkscape for most of bitmap to vector conversions. Most convert very well.
Lion 1.jpg
Lion 2.jpg
John
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