With Document Swatches as the library, traced fills and strokes take the
library color without a swatch link. Global, spot and tint swatches no
longer link the trace, so editing a swatch later leaves the trace
unchanged, and swatch order no longer decides whether a fill is linked.
Each region still takes the nearest library color, and a tint traces at
the color the tint swatch shows.
When a process swatch listed before a global or spot swatch showed the
same color, a traced fill of that color took the process swatch and
stayed unlinked. Of the swatches that trace as one color, the first
linked one now gives the fill, and the first one otherwise.
Tracing a photo or a large image ran inside imageTrace.make on the UI
thread, so the window froze for as long as the trace took, with nothing
to say it was working.
A trace the user asks for (Object > Image Trace > Make and Make and
Expand, the task bar's Image Trace, the Image Trace panel's Trace and
presets) now runs on a thread of its own, as heavy plug-in filters do.
The status bar says so, and after 0.4 s a progress window shows how
many of the image's colors are traced, with Cancel and Continue in
Background (imageTrace.cancelRuns, imageTrace.hideRuns).
The result goes back to the command it was prepared for
(cmd::TraceRun, Traced::hand_in), which takes it only for the same
object, image and settings, so the edit is one undo step as before. A
newer trace of the same object replaces one still running, and a trace
whose image or settings changed meanwhile changes nothing. The control
channel, MCP, scripts and the web trace at once, as before.
The tracer reports its stages and color layers to a callback and stops
when it says so (trace_watched).
With the Document Library palette, each pixel took the library color
nearest in plain Oklab distance. A 50% gray lies nearer in that distance
to a saturated blue of the same lightness than to black or a light
cream, and a muted brown is also nearer to the blue than to either. With
a black, cream and blue library, both traced as the blue.
This changes how Document Library matches pixels: each pixel now takes
the library color nearest with differences in hue and chroma (Oklab a
and b) counted three times as much as lightness. The same measure picks
which library colors are used. Neutral and muted tones take a neutral
library color, and the other palettes are unchanged.
With Method Abutting, neighboring colors share one exact edge. The canvas
smooths each path's edges on its own, so each path covers only part of the
pixels along that edge, and a thin line of the background can show between
the colors. The adjustments page did not say so. It now describes the line,
names the default and the presets that use Abutting (Default, Auto Color,
3 Colors, 6 Colors and 16 Colors), says which exports show it (SVG and PDF
in most viewers; raster exports with Type Optimized, or with Art Optimized
above 10 million pixels or 16,384 pixels on a side), and points to
Overlapping, which stacks the colors and shows no background along shared
edges.
Flat Logo traces a copy of the image at most 1024 pixels on a side,
averaged down by a whole factor, so a 1025-pixel image is traced at
513 pixels. The trace's warnings did not say so, because they compared
the image only with the decoded raster. For an image over 1500 pixels
they said instead that it is traced more slowly, which Flat Logo does
not do.
The trace result now carries Flat Logo's working size when it averaged
the image down. imageTrace.make and imageTrace.makeAndExpand then name
both sizes in their warnings, and the status bar shows that note, in
place of the slower-trace and megapixel notes. Other modes keep their
warnings. The message has a row in each catalog that translates the
other Image Trace warnings.
A trace whose kept colors were traced and produced no paths gave no
warning, or, with Ignore Color on, said that Ignore Color left those
colors out. The Ignore Color warning now shows only when no kept color
was traced at all, and otherwise the first warning says that the colors
that match keepColors produce no paths. The new message has a row in
each complete-message catalog.
Whether Ignore Color or keepColors leaves a palette entry out is now
decided once per entry, so tracing a layer no longer scans the
keepColors list for each pixel.
Docs: docs/image-trace-adjustments.md.
Image Trace had no way to trace some of an image's colors and leave the
rest out. Ignore Color drops one color, so tracing only the line work of
a multi-color image took a full trace and then deleting the other
colors' paths by hand.
With "keepColors": ["#rrggbb", ...] in the params of imageTrace.make and
imageTrace.makeAndExpand, only the palette colors within about 30 levels
of a listed color are traced, the distance Ignore Color matches by. With
Method Abutting, the kept colors' paths are the same as in a trace of
every color. With Method Overlapping, a kept color's paths do not reach
under the colors left out, as with Ignore Color. An empty list traces
every color, and a value that is not a six-digit hex color is refused.
Flat Logo mode does not use the list.
The reply's warnings name each listed color that matches none of the
colors the trace found, and say when nothing was traced; the status bar
shows the first. The warnings are translated in every complete catalog.
The params help of imageTrace.make lists keepColors and the new
warnings, and the help of imageTrace.makeAndExpand lists the warnings
it returns.
The Automatic palette counts flat art's colours by area (a colour needs
about 1% of the picture, 0.5% at Colors 100) and fits that count with
median cut and area-weighted k-means. A stem, a highlight, or a near
white beside a pale background (within 24 levels, so in one box) was
averaged into a large neighbour; mixed-colour merging and Noise could
then remove what was left.
On the flat route only, after the count is fitted, rare_colours finds
the colours too rare or too close for it and keeps those that are
distinct (at least 2.5 in Oklab x 100 from every palette colour and from
the main colour each stands for), flat (mostly one histogram bin) and
drawn (a 4-connected region of their own unblended pixels of at least 8
pixels, or three of at least 4); a colour lying between two others, as
anti-aliasing mixes them, must also have an inside. At most six, largest
region first. They stay fixed while the other colours are refitted
around them; merge_mixed leaves them alone; denoise_keeping keeps their
regions of 4 pixels or more whatever Noise is (smaller specks still go).
Full Tone, Limited and Automatic's continuous-tone route are unchanged,
and denoise without kept labels is as before.
Methods cited in the code: median cut (Heckbert 1982), k-means (Lloyd
1982), Oklab (Ottosson 2020), salient-colour preservation (Fukuda et al.
2019, doi:10.1117/12.2521607). The rule and its numbers are VectorCraft's
own; Adobe does not document how its palettes are chosen.
Tests (code-drawn): a rare stem or patch over 2-8 flat colours, hard
and anti-aliased at 1x and 2x; near-white highlights on #FFF4E0 kept and
still paths at Noise 16; a 3 px #909090 stem on #808080; scattered
single pixels of the same areas add no colour; denoise_keeping at Noise
0-32.
Measured on 66 synthetic flat logos (22 designs x hard 1x, anti-aliased
1x and 2x; local inputs): every key colour and no spurious one in 66
(was 39); missing key colours 0 (was 43), spurious 0 (was 2), merged
pairs 0 (was 46); rendered dE00 0.348 -> 0.138. Four public-domain scan
crops take the continuous-tone route and are unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018tBcdwNhptqtmX32JCGFzB
The public documentation says Image Trace warns about images larger
than 1500 pixels on a side but traces them, only more slowly. VectorCraft
traced them silently, and refused any trace of more than 2,000,000
anchors, which a 4000 x 3000 photo at High Fidelity Photo nearly reaches
(1.9 million on a code-drawn photo) and a noisier one passes.
- imageTrace.make and makeAndExpand return `warnings`: one for an image
over 1500 px on a side (traced, but more slowly; a lower-fidelity
preset or a smaller copy is quicker), one for an image over 64 MP
that was traced from a scaled-down copy. The app shows the first in
the status bar.
- MAX_TRACE_ANCHORS is 8,000,000 natively (2,000,000 on wasm, where a
page has at most 4 GB). Measured through imageTrace.make on
code-drawn photos: about 90 bytes an anchor kept in the document;
7.9 million anchors kept 685 MB with an 876 MB peak (4000 x 3000,
Full Tone at Colors 100, Paths 100, Noise 1, 37 s).
- The refusal keeps its translated advice: raise Noise, lower Paths or
Colors, or pick a lower-fidelity preset.
Tests: a_large_image_traces_with_a_warning (1600 x 40 and 1500 x 8
code-drawn images, make and make-and-expand),
trace_warnings_name_a_large_or_scaled_down_image, a compile-time check
of the limit's range, and a UI test that the status bar shows the note.
Source:
https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/image-trace-results-optimization.html
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018tBcdwNhptqtmX32JCGFzB
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