reference images

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Annotation

Reference images

Drop a raster image behind your work as a backdrop to trace or align against.

A reference image is a picture you place on the canvas to work over - a sketch, a photo, a scan, an existing pattern - so you can trace it or line your construction up against it. It sits behind everything else, purely as something to look at. It is not geometry: nothing snaps to it, nothing depends on it, and it does not export.

Placing an image

Use File > Import Image and pick a picture. It drops onto the canvas centered on the origin, at its own pixel size.

The image is pinned by two corner points at its lower-left and lower-right. Those two points set where it sits, how big it is, and how it's rotated - and its aspect ratio stays locked, so it never stretches out of proportion. Drag either corner to move, resize, or rotate the whole picture.

Adjusting it

• Move / scale / rotate: drag the two corner points.
• Fade it back: select the image and change its transparency in the Layers style strip. Turning the alpha down lets your construction read clearly over a faint backdrop - handy for tracing.

The picture is saved inside your design file, so a design with a reference image stays self-contained and travels with it.

It's only a reference

A reference image is a backdrop and nothing more:

• Your construction never attaches to it: there's nothing on the image to snap to.
• It always sits at the very bottom of the stack, under all your geometry.
• It is left out of SVG export. What you draw over it exports; the backdrop does not.

Not the same as an image-driven field

Dropping an image as a backdrop is different from using an image to drive a design. On the node graph side you can sample an image so its light and dark values steer parameters across space - for example, turning a photo into a field of dots that grow and shrink with its brightness (a halftone). That's a live, parametric use of an image that produces real geometry, not a passive backdrop.

If you want the picture to shape your pattern rather than just guide your hand, see the field pipeline. A placed reference image can cross over: select it and run Edit > Reference in Nodes, and the Reference node carries the picture itself into the graph, ready for Image Sample.

Note

Rule of thumb: import a reference image when you want to trace or align by eye; use an image-driven field when you want the image itself to generate geometry.

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