Turn Pixelated Images Into Crisp Vectors – Affinity Tutorial for Beginners

So, in today's video, we're going to learn how to turn an image from a blurry sort of mess into a sharp image. So, inside Affinity, I found a image of Affinity's logo that we're going to turn from a blurry sort of low res image into something that is vector-based and much sharper to look at. So we can export it in larger formats or just do something to make it look a lot more crisp and just good to look at. Essentially what you want to do here is you want to make sure that first of all you have your image which in my case I do have my Affinity image right in front of me. And the second thing you want to do is you want to make sure you go inside vector view mode which is at the top here right next to your different workspaces. Now vector view mode is basically just a way to work in vectors. So if I were to for example draw a square just to kind of demonstrate this. If I draw a square on the screen here and I zoom in and we actually create some edges here. So if I say I have a edge around this size. If I'm inside vector mode you can see that right now things are looking very sharp because everything is mathematically calculated. But if I go inside pixel mode, then all of a sudden things starts to get a little bit more pixelated once I let's go ahead and make sure we're inside pixel mode. There we go. All of a sudden it starts looking very messy and blurry and all of that. And that's because right now we're seeing things in pixels. So make sure once you get into the software that you're inside vector mode. So we can actually see those sharp different edges. Now, from here, we do actually want to convert our image from a pixelated image into a vector-based image, which we can do using something called image trace. So, with the layer selected, and you don't have to be inside vector mode. You can also do this from inside pixel mode if you wanted to. You need to go up in the top left corner where you have the vector menu. You click on it, go down to image trace, and from here, you can actually see that all of a sudden, oh, it already starts to look a lot better. And we have a couple of different settings here. we can actually start tweaking in order to make things look the exact way we want it to. Essentially, edge threshold is going to determine how it is going to see different edges inside your image and also different contrast things like colors, lighting, and essentially how many shapes is it going to make based on your image. Now, right now I'm just having a simple logo which is not really going to have a lot of different um you know different colors. Uh, but if you had a very complex image, turning this up too much could actually make things look very messy. And turning it all the way down is going to make things look a little bit more cleaner. It's going to have fewer shapes, that kind of thing, because we don't want to have as much contrast inside this image here. But turning it all the way up is going to try to include as many changes in the image when it comes to, like I said, colors, edges, that kind of thing. making the image look a lot more complex. But also be careful with this one because it can mess up your image. So I'm just going to go and turn this all the way down. And the next one we have is something called curve fitting tolerance. Now curve fitting tolerance basically just goes in and says how many ank points do we want to have around the edges to make things look as accurate to the original image as possible. So basically once I turn all the way down, you can see that things look very smooth. There's not really anything like any jagged edges or anything like that going on. But if I turn all the way up, it's going to have much fewer anchor points. And you can see we start getting these weird little corners here. If I were to zoom in, you can see, oh, we get this little spike. But if I turn all the way down, things get a lot more um a lot more accurate to the original image and we get this much smoother shape. And to see the before and after, we have a couple different settings down at the bottom here. the no split view which is the first one. Basically just shows you the final result. But if you were to click on the second one, you can see that now we can see the before on the right side and the after on the left side. So we just kind of see how this is turning out. Is there any sort of inconsistencies? Do we have everything exactly the way we wanted to? We can also pick the other one over here which is called mirror mode which just basically shows them side by side. So, we have the new version on the left and the old version on the right here. Once you're satisfied, you can just sort of click apply. And once we do that, you're going to have this image layer over here on the side that has a couple of different objects inside of it. The first one is going to be one of the colors, at least in my case here, which is going to be the black logo. And then we have the background as the second object. And we can manipulate these differently. So, I can move it around. Essentially, it just kind of traces all the different colors and edges inside the photo and it cuts them out and puts them on separate layers and places them inside a vector

format so we don't get all those pixels. And doing so also allow for us to go back inside our document at the top here and we want to go down to setup document setup and let's say I want to increase the size of my canvas here because I want the logo to be bigger. I can say instead of having 225 in this case here, I can say 700. Once I do that and click okay, you can see, oh, all of a sudden my canvas is a lot bigger. But when I scale up the image, it is not going to get pixelated because we're inside a vector format. If I were to do the same thing to the original image, if I were to just sort of drag it in here again, you can see we have the original image here. If it were to zoom out, go back up to document setup. Document setup and increase this one to 700 pixels as well. And go ahead and click okay and enlarge it. You can see that we will actually get pixels because we're basically just scaling up something that is very low res. So, it's not really going to get any sort of sharper. And if we were to put this logo inside a website, it's going to have these blurry edges because it's a very low res image. But having the new version over here, which is a lot sharper, basically means that now on a website or wherever you want to put your logo, uh it's going to be a lot more sharper. And that is basically how we do image trace to make things look a lot more sharp inside Affinity. And that is basically all I had for you today. So, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys next time. Hey, hey.