Importing and handling images

Hello students, welcome to Kwickprep. Do you have to draw every background yourself? No. You can bring in a photo of your school or a scanned drawing. Today we will learn how to import images into Synfig Studio and handle them correctly.

First, why import at all? You can use a photo as a background, like a school ground. You can scan a hand drawing and trace over it with Synfig tools. You can add a logo or a ready picture to your video. All of this saves a lot of drawing time.

Before importing, know two kinds of images. A raster image is made of tiny coloured dots called pixels, while a vector image is made of shapes and curves. When you zoom in, a raster image gets blurry, but a vector image stays sharp. Photos in PNG or JPEG are raster, and SVG files are vector. Shapes drawn in Synfig are vector.

Synfig can import many formats. PNG is raster and can have a transparent background. JPEG is raster and suits photos. BMP and GIF are older raster formats for simple pictures. SVG is vector and suits clip art. You can also import another Synfig file, .sif or .sifz, to reuse a whole scene.

Here are the steps to import. First, open the File menu. Next, click Import, or press control and the letter I together. Then choose the image file from your computer. Click the import or open button. A new layer holding the image appears on the canvas and in the layers panel.

Choose the format carefully for characters. A PNG file can store transparent pixels, where nothing is drawn. So a PNG character sits cleanly on your background. A JPEG cannot store transparency. So a JPEG character shows a white box around it.

Pause and predict. You import sky dot jpg first, and then boy dot png. Which layer is on top? The boy is on top, because a new layer is added above the selected one. And yes, you see the sky around him, because his PNG background is transparent.

Now let us handle the image. Select the image layer in the layers panel. With the transform tool, drag the image, or drag its corner handles to resize it. In the params panel, the top left and bottom right values set the box the image fills. Be careful to resize evenly, so a round face does not turn oval.

Some quality tips. Import images at about the size you will use them. Enlarging a raster image a lot makes it blurry. Very large images make Synfig slow and the file heavy. Keep your images in the same folder as the project, because Synfig links to the image file.

That last point is important. Synfig usually stores only the path to the image file. It does not copy the image itself. If you move or rename the image, the layer shows it as missing. So when you copy your project, copy the whole folder with its images. When you share work, share the folder, not only the .sifz file.

An image layer behaves like any other layer. You can animate it in three ways. With animation mode on, change its position at different times to slide it across. Animate its amount from zero to one to fade it in. You can also put rotate or scale layers above it, inside a group, to spin or zoom it.

Finally, a rule every student must follow. Use your own photos and drawings whenever you can. Otherwise, use images that have a free licence allowing reuse. Do not simply copy any picture from the internet, because it may be protected by copyright. And give credit to the creator when the licence asks for it.

Let us revise what we learned today. Import an image with File, Import, or control I. Raster images blur when enlarged, and vector images stay sharp. PNG keeps a transparent background, but JPEG does not. Resize images evenly with the transform tool. And always keep your images together with the project folder.