Image Overview

A source image is the bitmap a Vexy Lines document is built on — a photo, drawing, scan, or rendered image with some light and dark to it. Fills read it to figure out stroke thickness, dot size, dashes, embossing, and the rest.

It's not the finished vector, and it won't show up in your export. It just sits underneath while you work, more like raw material than the final piece.

How Vexy Lines reads it

Internally, Vexy Lines treats the image as shades of gray from black to white. Dark areas turn into the heavier, denser parts of a fill; light areas stay thin or empty. That's the whole trick — one tonal range driving everything from fine hairlines to solid coverage.

You don't have to use all of it. With Image & Signal, each fill can trace just a slice of the grays — only the shadows, only the highlights, the midtones — or invert things for light strokes on a dark background.

Choosing a good image

Cleaner images give you cleaner results. You want strong shapes, edges that are easy to read, and a subject that doesn't blend into the background — portraits, single objects, animals, buildings, a landscape with a clear silhouette.

When a photo comes in grainy, washed out, or busy, don't go fixing it one fill at a time. Sort out the image first.

Filters

Filters let you adjust the source image before any fill touches it. A reliable order: set the base with Brightness and Contrast, pull detail back with Shadows / Highlights and Sharpen, tidy up the tonal range with Levels, then finish with Color, Gradient, or Remove Background to separate the subject from its surroundings.

More than one image

A document can hold several source images. Each one belongs to a group, and a fill uses whichever source image is nearest above it in the hierarchy. So different parts of the same artwork can trace from different images.