Monday, January 28, 2008

Vector Magic

It's a common problem. You have a bitmap image but you really need a vector image for resizing, animating in flash, using the curves for masking, or printing in a high resolution format. Often there is simply no solution like redrawing the artwork by hand in a program like Illustrator, and depending on the complexity of the image this may be the only solution.

Adobe originally released a program called Streamline which was a simple utility built expressly for the purpose of converting bitmap images into vector artwork. Now Adobe has built this functionality directly into Illustrator, available as "Live Trace".

Still there are certain images that live trace doesn't handle as well as it potentially could. I would love to see how this technology will look in five years.

Recently a friend of mine sent me a link to an online application called Vector Magic. Vector Magic is a bitmap to vector conversion utility that is entirely web based, and wow does it ever do an amazing job ! I was actually very suprised to find the ease of use, and level of sophistication available in this free web-based software. Try it yourself. Grab a simple bitmap logo and walk through the steps you will be suprised at the quality of the resulting vector image.

http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/ Click this link to go to the vector magic site.

by Ian at 2:47 PM |