Unable to get a picture to trace

Been trying to trace an image in lightburn but the image will not trace properly. Can anyone give any advise I am new to lightburn? I have also attached a copy of the image I think. Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Sheriff Badge

Actually I attached the wrong image this is the correct one.
Stanly Badge 2

LightBurn’s trace tool will definitely work on this, but it likely wont produce the results you’re after - at least not without manual effort to clean up the results. The low contrast-difference between the paint fill and the brass can make things difficult for our trace tool, but there are a few ways around this depending on what you want to do.

  1. Rather than break the image into the separate parts, the outside can be traced and applied as a mask to the image - this would prevent anything outside the star shaped outline from being etched, and you would run the image as an image, rather than a filled vector shape. See more detailed instructions here: Image Masking - LightBurn Software Documentation. This may not work for your intent.

To do this, trace the image in a way that leaves the outline of the badge. Then select the traced geometry, Ctrl or CMD + ā€˜U’ to Ungroup the lines, delete everything but the outside shape. Then, select the outside shape of the badge, hold Ctrl or CMD, click the image to select it, then right click and select ā€œApply Mask to Imageā€ - then adjust your cut/etch as needed.

  1. You can run multiple passes of the Trace tool to highlight different sections of the art, tracing each one, and deal with the cleanup required after. This will get more detail out of the image at the cost of having multiple layers of stacked similar traces that need editing. Best to do these traces each into a separate layer to make editing easier after the fact.

  2. You could attempt adjusting the image before tracing to bring out the edges to be more pronounced. To do this, right click the image and select ā€œadjust imageā€. Below is an image of my settings and the results. From here, run the trace again. In practice, this did not make a ā€˜complete’ trace as you’re looking for.

or finally, what will likely produce the best vectors, is to simply trace the geometry manually. I’d estimate you could do this in under half an hour, and use the results of a Trace to help draft it.

If this is a project you’re doing for the sheriffs office, I’d highly suggest you contact them for their artwork in a digital format.

I’ve attached a sample of each method with your art.
sherriff.lbrn2 (1.0 MB)

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Where/what is the ā€˜tire’?


Have you tried to ā€˜burn’ this???

:smile_cat:

Whoops - this post was adapted from another reply, I’ll fix :laughing:

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