Smart Trace
Turn aerial photos and site plan images into editable vector paths in minutes.
Smart Trace is a 5-step wizard that extracts garden boundaries, paving outlines, and planting areas directly from aerial photos, site survey images, or scanned drawings. You load an image, adjust its contrast and crop, calibrate the real-world scale using two known points, then click any region to automatically detect its edges and produce a clean vector path. The resulting paths are imported into your drawing as standard editable entities — ready to use as garden bed boundaries, hardscape footprints, or contour reference lines.
Open the Smart Trace wizard
In the top toolbar, open the Import menu and choose Vectorize. The full-screen Smart Trace wizard opens, showing five steps in the left panel: File, Adjust, Calibrate, Trace, and Done. On the File step, drag and drop your image or PDF onto the upload area, click to browse for a file, or paste directly from the clipboard. Supported formats include PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, WebP, and PDF.
Activate Smart Trace
Smart Trace requires an underlay to be present. With a PDF or image underlay on the canvas:
1. Click the Smart Trace button in the toolbar (or go to Tools > Smart Trace) 2. Alternatively, right-click an underlay entity and choose Smart Trace
The cursor changes to the Smart Trace crosshair and the Smart Trace control panel appears.
Boost contrast and reduce brightness on faded aerial photos to make property lines and paving edges clearly visible before tracing.
Set edge detection sensitivity
Before clicking a region, adjust the two sensitivity controls in the Smart Trace panel:
- Edge Detection Sensitivity — higher values detect faint edges; lower values detect only strong contrast edges. Start at the midpoint and adjust if results are poor.
- Minimum Area — paths smaller than this area (in m²) are ignored. Increase this to avoid tracing small noise elements; decrease it to trace small garden features.
These settings remain in place for the current tracing session.
[object Object]
Click a region to trace
Click anywhere inside the closed region you want to trace. Smart Trace analyzes the surrounding edges and generates a suggested path.
The suggested path appears as a highlighted overlay on top of the underlay. Inspect the path — check that it follows the boundary accurately and that no extraneous segments have been included.
Each region can be traced at its own settings — use low smoothing for straight paving edges and high smoothing for organic bed shapes.
Accept or reject the suggestion
- Press Enter to accept the suggested path. A new path entity is added to the canvas on the active layer at the traced boundary.
- Press Esc to reject the suggestion and return to the region-selection state. Adjust the sensitivity settings and click the region again to try a different detection.
After accepting, the tool remains active so you can immediately click another region to trace.
Accept rough suggestions and refine them with the Node Edit tool — it is often faster than trying to achieve a perfect trace.
Manual touch-up with Node Edit
Accepted Smart Trace paths are regular path entities. Press N to activate the Node Edit tool, then select the traced path to access its individual nodes.
- Drag nodes to reposition them
- Click on a segment and drag to add a new node
- Select a node and press Delete to remove it
- Toggle segments between straight and curved using the node type controls in the Inspector
Node Edit lets you correct any inaccuracies in the detected trace.
[object Object]
Key Parameters
| Name | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Color Tolerance | medium | Controls how tightly the trace follows the detected edge. Lower values hug the edge more closely; higher values allow more deviation and produce smoother but looser paths. |
| Simplification | medium | Controls how aggressively redundant nodes are removed from the path. Higher values produce fewer nodes and simpler paths; lower values preserve more detail. |
| Smoothing | medium | Rounds sharp corners into flowing curves. Raise for organic shapes such as planting beds and ponds; lower or set to zero for geometric shapes such as walls, paving, and buildings. |
| Region of Interest | none | An optional boundary drawn on the image. When set, Smart Trace only analyzes edges inside this area and ignores all content outside it. Useful for excluding title blocks, text, and image borders. |
| Output as curves | off | When off, the trace produces straight-segment (polyline) paths; when on, it produces smooth curved paths. Choose based on the type of shape being traced. |
Trace different areas of the same image at different settings — paving and walls at low smoothing, planting beds at high smoothing — and import them all in one go at the Done step.
The calibration step is essential for accurate real-world scaling. Skipping or rushing calibration will import paths at the wrong scale, requiring manual rescaling after import.
Frequently Asked Questions
What image types work best with Smart Trace?
High-contrast images with clear, well-defined outlines produce the best results — clean site survey drawings, sharp aerial photos, or scanned plans. If edges are faint or broken, use the Adjust step to increase contrast, then use the Brush tool in the Trace step to paint in missing edge segments before tracing.
How do I prevent Smart Trace from picking up text, title blocks, and hatching?
Draw a Region of Interest around just the area you want to trace. Smart Trace will only analyze edges inside that boundary and completely ignore everything outside it. Use a rectangle ROI for simple areas, or a polygon ROI for irregular shapes.
Can I trace multiple regions and import them all at once?
Yes. Every region you click in Trace mode adds a new path to the traced paths list. You can build up a full set of paths — lawn, beds, paving, and more — at different tolerance and smoothing settings, then import them all together from the Done step.
What is Node Cleanup on the Done step?
Node Cleanup removes nodes that are so close together they provide no useful detail. Fewer redundant nodes means the imported path is easier to edit manually with the node editing tools after import. Run it before importing whenever the node count looks unusually high.
How reliable is the imported path scale?
The scale depends on the quality of your two-point calibration in step 3. Use a known distance measured from a reliable source such as a property survey or architect's drawing, and avoid distances estimated visually. A carefully calibrated image produces paths that match real-world dimensions within the resolution of the source image.