Friday, November 02, 2007

Absolutely Magic Vectorising...

If you're looking for a way to convert dodgy bitmaps into smooth, smooth vector images - and who isn't? - go to http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/. In a word, it's fantastic. If you're familiar with tools like CorelTrace, you'll be astounded by the superior results. And it's free. Upload your bitmap, wait a few moments, and the SVG or EPS version of your image is ready to save back to your PC. Cool, cool, cool.
Truly... this is astonishingly cool.

4 comments:

martin said...

I've been putting everyone onto this. Often, I've had to redraw logos that have been faxed to me - this is will save alot of pain.

Mike said...

I tried a few images in this several months ago, and didn't think it was that much different to Inkscape's built-in tracing engine, which is based on the potrace engine.

A few reviews I read indicate that they think Vectormagic is slightly better than Inkscape, although they all say both Vectormagic and Inkscape are way ahead of CorelTrace and Illustrator.

I personally think that the hassle of uploading and waiting for a slower online engine would limit my use of something like this, except for particularly difficult images.

On hint in vectorizing is that scaling the image up first in a drawing program like Photoshop or Gimp can often produce better fidelity for smaller images.

Anonymous said...

not really astonishing seeing that you have to pay for "tokens" in order to get the vector file. You can do this kind of tracing in illustrator for free..

Phil said...

The 'pay per use' scheme was introduced a couple of weeks ago. If you've been using Corel Draw's trace feature, this remains far better. Mike's coments on Potrace are noted - but then you've got to put up with the Inkscape interface ;-)