Edge Detection with Inkscape
Inkscape is a great open source drawing tool that can be thought of as an opens source alternative to Adobe Illustrator. It is perfect for making drawings, models, flyers, and pretty much any other type of graphic design. A pretty neat feature is the edge detection algorithm that it uses in order to draw lines around an image which allows you to modify different parts of the image without having to manually trace it. I wanted to color in a map of the United States to see all of the states that I have been in. This is a pretty simple task, but if I had to trace each individual state it would have been a nightmare. This short tutorial will show you how to take advantage of this powerful feature. Before we get started make sure you have Inkscape installed. If you are using a mac like me, be sure to have XQuartz installed before you try to install Inkscape.
- Fire up Inkscape and open the image that you want to edit. If you want to color in the map of US with me, you can use this picture.
- Make sure that the image is selected and go to Path –> Trace Bitmap
- Your image is now traced and you can color in whatever parts you like without having to worry about the colors bleeding over.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- workflows for ai coding from /* 🤖🛠️ */
- Reinvent the Wheel from Matthias Endler
- CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing) from pretix – behind the scenes
- You Can Choose Tools That Make You Happy from Fernando Borretti
- Using Git as S3 from Kris Tun
- Future Fonts from Blog – Brad Frost
- 21st Century C++ from Communications of the ACM
- Submarines DevCon 2025 Keynote Speech from JoshHaines.com
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Artificial Unintelligence – We are so inured to using AI that we believe we need it
Before people around the world were connected by the internet the proliferation of new ideas and modern technologies was slow. This was bad for the originators who had no means of quickly gauging…
via V.H. Belvadi June 1, 2025How often do LLMs snitch? Recreating Theo's SnitchBench with LLM
A fun new benchmark just dropped! Inspired by the Claude 4 system card - which showed that Claude 4 might just rat you out to the authorities if you told it to "take initiative" in enforcing its morals values while exposing it to evidence of malfe…
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries May 31, 2025OpenAI featured chatbot is pushing extreme surgeries to “subhuman” men
OpenAI's featured chatbot recommends $200,000 in surgeries while promoting incel ideology
via Citation Needed May 31, 2025Generated by openring