Remove backgrounds to make clip art out of photo 1

[flphoto]

I have a CNC plasma cutting machine that uses DXF files for the CAD program that came with it. I was told that I could download a photo into Corel Draw 12 and make it into a vector file, save it as a BMP or PNG file and turn it into a DXF file for cutting. During this process I could drop out all background and make the subject into a sillouette form. As a professional photographer I have used Photoshop for years but Corel Draw is all new. I purposely got Corel Draw 12 because I was told that the new X3 would not do what I needed to do. I have the Official Guide to Draw 12 but have no idea what to look for or where to start looking. Can someone please advise?

 

[harry99]

To experiment, look for "CorelTrace" which is what the vector tracing program was called in version 11.

However, I don't believe you will be able to do that satisfactorily, with any program, because a photograph is a continuous tone image and can only be approximated by vector objects. A scanned image of a line drawing (kids cartoon, etc) might work but it would have to be pretty simple -- solid outlines, filled only with colours of uniform tints etc -- and it would have to be scanned from the original drawing not from a halftone representation such as a book or newspaper.

To clarify that -- yes, Corel can try to create vector objects from any image, and it will succeed to a greater or lesser degree depending on the subject -- but it must create a vector object for every shade of every colour you see in the picture. So if you start from a continuous tone photo, you'll end up with thousands of vector objects, most of them too small to be worth cutting. Or you can set the tolerance quite wide, so that a range of similar colours convert to the same vector object -- but you will probably find that the results become unrecogniseable long before you get down to a small enough number of objects.

 

[harry99]

Sorry, ignore that -- its correct, but the answer to a slightly different question to the one you asked.

I'll be back in a moment with another.

 

[harry99]

OK, here's what CorelTrace 11 created for a sample photo:

Its a lot better than I expected and I suspect most photos would not be this easy.

Anyway, copy the image from CorelTrace to the clipboard and paste it into a new (empty) CorelDraw document. It is a group of 1300 objects but you are really only interested in two of them (that I've labelled A and B).

In CorelDraw you can Arrange : Ungroup so you can get at the individual objects, click on A to select it, shift click on B to select it without deselecting A and control-c to copy the pair to the clipboard. Then delete everything and paste your two items back to the document.

Edit : Select all then Arrange : combine and you have a single object representing your background.

File export will probably then let you create your DXF file.

In practice, I suspect the outline will not quite coincide with where you want the cut because its quite hard to distinguish hair from shadow -- though if you use a very smooth background and light it as well as the subject it will make the job easier.