Illustrator image trace vs Inkscape trace bitmap

Hello, I am looking to see if anybody who knows both Illustrator and Inkscape may know why I am getting different results on same file when tracing a jpg and converting to a vector. I will include screenshots. I am using both with their defaults upon install of the application.

For Illustrator I am selecting this image (same issue with others like it) and in the image trace panel just clicking Trace and then going up to object>image trace>expand. You can see in the screenshots the image trace settings. After expanding you can see the image looks kind of light in the middle and darker on the edges. It also has a white background and black fills with no strokes. If I change the fills to one color, it fills everything with that color. If I change to no fill, then a color it does same thing.

For Inkscape, I am using default settings also for the trace. It shows them in the first screenshot. I then delete the jpg from Inkcape and leave just the new vector and save it. If I open that one in Illustrator, you can see it has no white background and the fills are black and has no strokes. It is much cleaner looking too.

I would much prefer to use Illustrator as I am getting a little more confident with it and can find more tutorials online. I just don’t understand why they are behaving so differently. Any ideas?

I am attaching 4 screenshots of the Illustrator file and two for the Inkscape one (the second Inkscape file is showing opened in Illustrator as I opened it in there to see the result vs. the one done in Illustrator.

Thanks for any help.
Mike

in the Image Trace tab in AI, you will want to expand the Advanced options.
Click the “ignore white” checkbox.
then you can play around with the sliders: for art like this I would probably go higher with the “paths” and “corners” sliders, drop the “noise” slider all the way down, and then bring up the “threshold” by small increments until it looks like what you want.

7 Likes

Or Adobe Capture :slight_smile: I feel like that ultimately does the best job on tracing!

4 Likes

thank you both, I will try.

This topic was automatically closed 32 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.