: How to lower the details of a line-art illustration? Not too sure about the vocabulary but here is the bicolor icon I am referring to. This final result should then be used for laser engraving,

@Rambettina927

I think the fastest way to do this:

Method 1: If you already have a vector


Add some white shapes on top of your graphic to hide the details.
Then open the "pathfinder" panel, select all and "divide"
everything.
Then select at a piece of white, go in the menu "select" and choose
"select same fill color". And delete the white parts.


Method 2: In Photoshop or Gimp, then vector


Simply use the selection tool and fill the details areas with white.
You can also use a brush if you prefer. This should be very quick, especially with the polygonal lasso tool to select the extra details.
Then copy/paste that image in Illustrator and use the command
"Trace", adjust the settings to your preferences, then press
"expand" to make a vector out of this graphic.





If you want to soften the edges, you can add a stroke with a "round
corner" and manually fix what you don't like.






I don't know if there's still too many details in this example. You can fix this manually and quickly if you don't want to retrace everything and if you want to keep the asymmetry of the tracing.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Nimeshi706

Basing this upon comments which elude to laser etching not printing..... They are much different.

For laser etching you ideally want the vector graphic. I'm uncertain if GIMP can do that, since it's a raster-based application. This is especially true if dealing with only 4cm.



The original image should hold up okay. Some of the smaller detail will be lost, but the overall shape and variation should be held a bit.

If you simplify a great deal you may get better results though.... as you can see I removed all the minor intricacies of the image, reducing it to a single stroke and fill.

Depending upon the substrate being etched with the laser, your results could be similar to any of the stroke weights I've shown -- 1.5pt to 3pts. (these are estimates) On harder substrates, such as metal, you'll get a crisper etching. On softer substrates like plastic, the laser will burn away more material. On wood you tend to get the most burn in.

It is not unheard of to ask for a sample or at least discuss the art with the company doing the etching. They may be willing to run a sample on scrap material for you, or they will at least have some input as to how to improve art for their machines.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Shelley591

To simplify line art, it's often a matter of just doing it by hand. Delete the extra nodes, smooth out the lines as you see fit. Lots of hand tweaking.

However, here's one more automated technique I've used that sometimes works. From top-to-bottom:


Original Image
Image with a slight Gaussian blur applied
Image after adjusting Levels to sharpen the edges back up.




This, of course, was done in a raster image editor (such as Photoshop or The GIMP). At this point, you can paste the final image back into your vector tool (such as Illustrator or InkScape) and auto-trace it to convert it back into paths.

Vote Up Vote Down