Tips and Tricks: Advanced Bitmap to Vector Tracing With Colour Merging Using Flood Fill.

Brad Castle

30 May 2025 08:01

Carveco Tutorial: Advanced Bitmap To Vector Tracing With Colour Merging

In this tutorial, you’ll learn a nuanced approach to tracing bitmap images using Carveco Maker's Bitmap to Vector and Flood Fill tools. This is particularly useful when working with images that include subtle variations in colour where you want precise control over which areas are traced.

🔹 Reducing Colours Before Tracing

Import your image and go to Bitmap to Vector.
Use the Reduce Colours slider to merge similar colours.
Be cautious — reducing colours too much may eliminate important detail (e.g., leaf veins or skull highlights).
Find a balance where your important features (like subtle greens or highlights) are still visible.

🔹 Selectively Recolouring Using Flood Fill

Go to Bitmap > Flood Fill.
Select the colour you want to use, then click or drag over regions to manually assign them that colour.
This allows for refined colour merging without affecting other areas (unlike global colour linking).

🔹 Creating Vectors From Custom Colours

Exit Flood Fill mode using Esc or the Select Tool.
Set your Speckle Size and Smoothness — defaults are 2 and 75.
If leftover pixels appear in your vector, increase the Speckle Size to filter them out.
Click Create Vectors to generate the vector outlines for your coloured zones.

🔹 Refining Vector Output

Undo and adjust Speckle Size if you see small unwanted vectors.
This helps clean up your traced vectors without manually deleting leftover shapes.

🔹 When To Use This Technique

Use when colour reduction merges unwanted areas.
Especially helpful for designs with multiple similar colours or gradients that must be separated.

✔️ Key Takeaways

Use Flood Fill to manually recolour areas before vector creation.
Balance colour reduction with the need to preserve image details.
Raise Speckle Size to filter out small unwanted vector fragments.
This method is especially useful for complex images where automatic tracing fails to isolate shapes accurately.

🧠 Advanced Techniques

Combine Flood Fill and Reduce Colours workflows to isolate and recolour tricky shapes with more precision.
Adjust Speckle Size to ignore background noise or compression artefacts.
Re-colour partial gradients by layering multiple passes with the flood fill drag action.
Use manual colour replacement when automatic colour linking causes unexpected results in high-contrast areas.

🛠️ Troubleshooting

Problem: You’ve lost leaf detail when reducing colours.
Solution: Raise the colour count to preserve subtle gradients before applying Flood Fill.
Problem: Extra vectors appear after creating vectors.
Solution: Increase the Speckle Size to filter out stray pixels.
Problem: Flood Fill isn't working on a region.
Solution: Zoom in and ensure there is no tiny colour break; even a 1-pixel gap can block fill.
Problem: Colour blending affects parts you want to preserve.
Solution: Use manual flood fill instead of the automatic linking system.