Color Layers are one or several user-selected colors.

What does Select Color Layers do?

How to tell whether Color Layer Selection is activated

Select Color Layers

Activate Color Layer Selections

Deactivate Color Layer Selections

The difference between Color Layer Selection and the Pick Color

What does Select Color Layers do?

By default, Scan2CAD is “color blind” and sees raster images as non-white areas on a white background.

When you activate Select Color Layers some functions become “color aware” and only work on Selected Colored parts of the image. For example:

Before despeckling
After despeckling
No Color Layer Selected	Color Layer =blue	Color Layer = blue, gray

Without Color Layers Selected, Scan2CAD sees all the non white areas of the image as one color and only removes speckles that are entirely surrounded by white space.

With Color Layers Selected, Scan2CAD only sees Selected Colored speckles and removes these regardless of the background color they are on.

Before despeckling
After despeckling
No Color Layer Selected	Color Layers = all the colors on the image

Without Color Layers Selected, no despeckling has taken place because Scan2CAD sees the whole image as one color.

With all the colors on the image selected as Color Layers, any area of any color smaller than a given size has been treated as a speckle and removed.

Raster image
Vector image No Color Layers Selected
Selected Color Layer = blue	Selected Color Layers = blue, brown

Without Color Layers Selected, Scan2CAD sees all the non white areas of the image as one color and vectorizes them all to black.

With Color Layers Selected, Scan2CAD only sees and vectorizes Selected Color Layer parts of the raster image.

How to tell whether Color Layer Selection is activated

When Color Layer Selection is activated, red green and blue colors are displayed at the bottom of the screen:

In some dialogs that have a Preview Window, red green and blue colors are also displayed under the Preview Window:

Select Color Layers

Or:

If you are using a dialog that has a Preview Window and a Select Color Layers button, click the Select Color Layers button.

The Select Color Layers dialog appears.

Activate Color Layer Selections

Press the S key.

This only works if you have already selected some Color Layers Selected(see above). It does not work from a dialog with a Preview Window.

Or:

Or:

If you are using a dialog that has a Preview Window and a Select Color Layers button, click the Select Color Layers button.

Deactivate Color Layer Selections

Press the S key.

This does not work from a dialog with a Preview Window.

Or:

Or:

If you are using a dialog that has a Preview Window and a Select Color Layers button, click the Select Color Layers button.

The difference between Color Layer Selection and the Pick Color

You can select several Color Layers but only one Pick Color.

The Pick Color affects a wide range of functions. Color Layer Selection only affects Remove Speckles, Smooth, Detect Color Edges and vectorization.