Area takeoff

Area takeoff is the core of most jobs: paving, lawn, planting beds, gravel, concrete. PixelTakeoff gives you several tools for it because drawings vary, and picking the right one saves a lot of correcting later.

Set the drawing scale before you start. See Setting the drawing scale.

Which tool should I use?

Start with Region. It handles the large majority of work. Reach for the others when Region cannot do what you need.

Situation	Tool
A normal enclosed area on the drawing	Region (R)
Region grabs too much or too little and tolerance will not fix it	Precision Region (P)
You want to extend an area you already took off	Expand Region (X)
Easier to say what to keep than what to exclude	Inclusive Region (I)
The shape is a plain box, circle, ellipse or polygon	Shape (S)
The boundary is irregular and you want to draw it yourself	Free Trace (F)
Every area of one colour, all at once	Color Sweep (D)
The area is not enclosed because a boundary line is broken	Manual Border (B) first, then Region

Before your first click: name and colour

In the right panel, set the region name and colour before you start clicking.

Name and colour together define a group, and groups are what carry the totals you will price from. Everything you take off as “Paving” in the same colour adds into one total. If you take off half your paving under one name and half under another, you get two totals and it is easy to miss one.

Pick something a colleague would recognise on a printed sheet. Naming a group “Area 1” helps nobody at pricing time.

Region

The default tool, and the one to reach for first.

1. Select Region (R).
2. Set the name and colour.
3. Click inside the area you want.

PixelTakeoff detects the enclosed area around where you clicked, fills it, and measures it. Click the next area, and it adds to the same group.

Color Tolerance

Color Tolerance controls how closely colours must match for the tool to treat two parts of the drawing as the same area. It runs from 1 to 50 and defaults to 8.

• Fill escaped into areas you did not want: lower the tolerance.
• Fill stopped short of where it should have reached: raise it.

Change it in Region Settings, then click again. Work in small steps, since moving from 8 to 40 in one go usually replaces one problem with the other.

A hatched or textured area often needs a higher tolerance than a flat filled one, because the hatch introduces colour variation the tool would otherwise treat as a boundary.

When the fill escapes across the whole sheet

This nearly always means the boundary has a gap in it, so the fill leaks out and keeps going. Lowering tolerance may not help, because the gap is a genuine hole rather than a colour difference.

Use Manual Border (B) to draw a temporary line across the gap, then fill again. Borders you draw are guides for the fill and are not part of your measured quantities.

Precision Region

Use when Region cannot resolve an area cleanly, typically because the drawing puts several materials in very similar tones, or the area you want is only part of what Region detects.

It gives you finer control over what gets included at the cost of a little more work per area. If you find yourself fighting tolerance on the same area more than twice, switch to Precision Region rather than continuing to guess.

Expand Region

Use to grow an area you have already taken off, for example when paving continues past a boundary you filled first.

This adds to the existing region rather than creating a second one, so the group total stays correct without you merging anything afterwards.

Inclusive Region

Some areas are easier to describe by what belongs to them than by what does not. A courtyard with many planters is quicker to define by the courtyard outline than by excluding each planter.

Use Inclusive Region (I) when the exclusions outnumber the inclusions.

Shape

For areas that are simply geometric. Shape (S) draws a box, circle, ellipse or polygon directly, without relying on the drawing having a detectable boundary at all.

This is the right tool for an area that is described in a note rather than drawn, or for a quick allowance.

Free Trace

Draw the boundary yourself, freehand. Use it when the area is irregular, the drawing is a poor scan, or no automatic tool is getting close.

It is slower, so treat it as a fallback rather than a default.

Color Sweep

When a drawing uses a consistent fill colour per material, Color Sweep (D) picks up everything sharing that colour in one action instead of you clicking each area.

Check the result before moving on. If the drawing reuses one colour for two different materials, the sweep will collect both, and you will need to erase what you did not want.

Checking your work

Before you move to the next material:

1. Compare against the drawing. Does the coloured area actually cover what you intended, with nothing missed and nothing extra?
2. Sanity check the number. A courtyard reading 4 m² or 40,000 m² is telling you something is wrong, usually the scale.
3. Look for overlaps. Two regions covering the same ground will count that ground twice.

Fixing mistakes

• Remove part of an area: use the Eraser (E). Quantities update as soon as you erase.
• Remove a whole region: select it in the right panel and delete it.
• Undo: the usual undo shortcut steps back through your actions.
• Reshape: for regions with editable outlines, drag the points to adjust.

Erasing recalculates the area immediately, so the group total always reflects what is actually on the drawing.

Common questions

Can two regions overlap? A new region will not claim ground that an existing region has already measured, so ordinary work does not double count. The exception is a duplicated region left sitting on top of its original, which counts twice because a copy is treated as a second real item.

Why is my region a different area than I expected? Check the scale first, since that is the usual cause. If the scale is right, zoom in and confirm the fill actually covers what you think it covers.

Can I change a group’s colour later? Yes, from the layer panel. The measurement does not change, only how it is drawn and labelled.