Craft Edge

I'm new to all this and have a question. I can successfully break apart a black and white image for SCAL in inkscape however I am having trouble with color images.
How do I trace them and break them apart or is there a way to make my color image black and white so that I can trace it like I have been? I tried tracing it by number of colors but I really don't want multiple groups of the same image in different colors, I just want a simple black and white to work with so I get my individual layers for cutting.

I hope I've explained this right. Any help would be appreciated.

This is the image I was trying to work on.....

You don't need to convert this one to black and white since it has good black lines. Change your Brightness cutoff from the default o.45 to somewhere around 0.1. That should give you the black lines and just a little bit of the red in the heart. You will need to clean up the heart area a little. HTH

Thank you so much Heather! I knew it had to be an easy fix.