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
- Setting up ANTLR4 on Windows
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- Ten Years of Dreaming of San Francisco
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Fedora Magazine: Contribute to Fedora 44 KDE and GNOME Test Days from Fedora People
- Pluralistic: bunnie's piggyback hack (09 Jan 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Clicks Communicator from Chris Hannah
- A Year Of Vibes from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- Pluralistic: A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (18 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Moving from WordPress to Substack from charity.wtf
- Grow, Like a Tree Not a Cancer from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2025 (02 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Announcing Live AI & Design Systems Jam Sessions!
Ian, TJ, and I are excited to announce live AI & Design Systems Jam Sessions with our AI & Design Systems course community! Our first jam session will be Thursday, February 26 at 10AM ET. In these recurring biweekly Zoom […]
via Blog – Brad Frost February 16, 2026I Sold Out for $20 a Month and All I Got Was This Perfectly Generated Terraform
Until recently the LLM tools I’ve tried have been, to be frank, worthless. Copilot was best at writing extremely verbose comments. Gemini would turn a 200 line script into a 700 line collection of gibberish. It was easy for me to, more or less, ignore LLM…
via matduggan.com February 16, 2026Pluralistic: The online community trilemma (16 Feb 2026)
Today's links The online community trilemma: Reach, community and information, pick two. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bruces x Sony DRM; Eniac tell-all; HBO v PVRs; Fucking damselflies; Gil Scout Cookie wine-pairings; Bi…
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow February 16, 2026Generated by openring