(Archived) Can I trace with Skitch?

[jodzeee 0]

Can I trace over an image, then remove it and use my annotations without the background?

Also, can I save my annotations from Skitch as a vector object and have the ability to modify it in Illustrator or another program?

And just one more question (for now!), I just installed Skitch for Windows. Can I access/open iOS Skitch files and modify them in the Windows version and vice versa?

Thank you!

[ldekay 16]

@jodzee

With Skitch for Windows you can copy all of your annotations to the Clipboard and then paste them into your other program. However, the annotations will just be a bitmap. Sorry, no vector.

You can get your iOS Skitch notes to Windows via Evernote. If you login to EN on iOS, they will be saved to your account. The on Windows you will have to install Evernote, login to your account, sync, and then "Markup with Skitch".

Hope this helps,

Lester

[jodzeee 0]

This is very helpful, thank you. It's still a bit clumsy, but at least I know what's possible now.

Is there a way to group annotations? I'm finding when I try to move or resize some smaller markups, I cannot select all the elements. But in other cases, they are all one piece (not sure how I managed that, but it'd be preferred!).

What I have is some handwritten text (I need it to be that way rather than a font).

[Joe Lopez 108]

@jodzee

It depends upon what you mean by group.

Depending upon your client you can grab multiple Skitch objects (arrows, text, etc) using one of the special keys (command, crtl, or shift) while clicking on an object. This will let you grab more than one at the time and then you can use the mouse to move them all at the same time. Please note this will move them relative to their starting position. So if you have 2 objects that are an inch apart and move them, they will still be one inch apart from each other and move in tandem.

If by grouping you mean you want to select a bunch of objects and then assign to a group so you can move them as one unit all of the time, that we cannot currently do. It is an interesting idea for us to add to our future feature list.

And I think when you say "they are all one piece" I believe you mean you placed several objects (or drew them with the pen tool at the same time) and they hardened into a new object. If that's the case then you might have seen our Wet Ink feature in use. Skitch has a feature called Wet Ink where when you draw something (either a predefined shape, or with the pencil) we draw the object and then "dry" it which then redraws the shape and all overlapping pieces into a single object. For example you could use the pen tool to draw the letter "A" and if you did this with three lines, and provided you did it quickly enough, then all three lines would dry into the shape of a letter A. In essence the three lines are "grouped" into a permanent shape until you undo/delete the object.

Hope this answers your question.

[jodzeee 0]

Yes, that would be a good feature to have. I experimented in the Windows Desktop version, but it's nearly impossible to select multiple objects if they're small because the selection "thingy" is gigantic and awkward.

The wet ink is what must have happened, which in my case was good ... however, it happened to one bit of text, but not the rest.

For example, I wrote "Healthy" and it's glued together (yay!), but when I wrote "Dead" I've got two pieces for the A, two for one of the Ds, and I think three for the E! I wish I could glue them together after the fact. I also wrote the number 45 and 85 and one is glued, but the other is two separate numbers. I'm not sure why they didn't act "wet" or what I did or didn't do to make it not happen in such a way.

One thing to note, I did write them large, then resize them, maybe that had something to do with it. But now that they're small, I cannot select all the pieces of each letter :-(

At any rate, my workaround for tracing an image (on my iPad):

• Imported an image and traced over it
  
• Since I couldn't then remove the picture, I copied the annotations to a new canvas
  
• Since I couldn't select all the pieces of the letters I wrote, I had to go back and delete the ones I already copied, then select the little pieces and copy/paste them to the new canvas
  
• Then I realigned them
  
• Then I e-mailed it to myself and brought that image into Photoshop where I could do additional editing. I was happy the file was nice and big and high res so it didn't look grainy!
  

Just curious, are there any future plans to allow it to be exported as vector objects? I thought I'd read somewhere that there used to be a feature to save as SVG and other formats.

Thanks again for the quick response!

[Joe Lopez 108]

@jodzee

Our Wet Ink feature has a small time delay before it starts to "dry" and if you were writing and then lifted up your finger (mouse) long enough for the system to start "drying" the ink then the previous wet ink items would dry even if you are starting new ones. So what may have happend is you wrote Healthy and you kept writing without a pause long enough to trip the drying phase, but may have paused at some point when writing Dead which resulted in a partial drying.

Once something dries it is now its own object and anything dry cannot be re-wetted. So if you draw over a dry object with more wet ink it should not attach the new wet ink to the old dry ink.

You do have the ability to save the entire annotated item in various formats, but if you want to export a specific object as a vector then no you are not able to do that. We may have additional formats available in future releases.