Why is it that now in X3 when I trace a B&W drawing I get so many redundant objects?
Before I would have a black curve form in back and all the white curve forms "on top" of the black.
Now with X3 there are so many layers - the black background curve is not solid anymore - all the white fill curves of the drawing are cut into the black background as well.
It seems much more complicated than the trace results I got in V.12.
I've tried changing the trace settings but I can't seem to get the results I want.
Do I just go back to version 12 trace?
I'm not all happy either!
X3's trace has some marked improvements, like working directly from Draw. And id does and absolutely astounding job on color images.
But I use Trace 99% of the time for vectoring hand drawn cartoon style line art and I have to say: X3's Trace bites hard in the line art quality department.
All of the subtle nuances of the hand drawn edges are many of the smaller dots and circular edges are left out or destroyed (with any setting)
The only problem with 12's was that there were too many nodes left and the Bezier smooth/cusp ends were left in what seemed like random directions making the art look more "crusty" than need to be.
I will usually use monochrome bitmaps, letter sized at 600 dpi, taken from the photo editing application after some blurring and contrast to eliminate small spurs and uneeded splatter artifacts. Anyone doing a comparison between X3 and 12 will see the same result.
So I still have to leave version 12 installed on my system.
I'm not positive but it also seems like I was getting better results from versions 8 and before.
So my three wishes for further development of Trace would be:
1) Allow for the reproduction of smaller detail and the capture of smaller object as in version 12-. Include a mechanisim for seeing larger curved areas that can be smoothed and calculated for closed match. This will yield the best results for cartooned line art.
2) When combining color swatches; Physically combine those objects too. It's proven to not be as worth it to combine colors before tracing as the objects are still numerous.
3) I like the way different colors are nested now, instead of overlapped (ONLY ON COLORED IMAGES) What in the heck is the deal now on line art!?!?! Manipulating line art images when adding color or just simply altering a curve or shape is a nightmare! Line art traces should be stacked... black outline - inside colored object - etc.
I do very much agree, the trace functions leave much to be desired.
Perhaps the Corel development team could reverse engineer the tracing routines implemented in Scanvec Amiable's Flexi Sign Pro, which I sometimes use for tracing.
It does an absolutely awesome job on ANY image, very few nodes, little deviation from where the paths should be, and cusp points and curved corners are seldom misinterpreted.
It's just a little tricky to use as the software requires a dongle to run and can only be installed on one machine at a time. In our case, this machine runs our RIP for our large format printer and is therefore not always available to me.
It's shortcomings include the absence of a woodcut trace routine that rivals Corel 12's.
Oh how I wish we hadn't gotten rid of Corel 12.
And how much more I even wish that Corel X4 will have the missing routines in it again (Centerline and Woodcut).
As of yet, I haven't tried X4
Your "Corel Cowboy" Synapse
At long last there's a forum where people are actually reading and replying to my boring posts.
Thank you for the information. I may get X4 after all.
Retrofitting my PC with Corel 12 seems a bit weird...