Vectorize Your Images

Since I’m not a GFX guy I’d like to know how useful this is and if it can easily be done in Paint.net, Photoshop or GIMP

All of those programs are pixel based. If you wanted to do something like this, you would need to use Adobe Illustrator, or if open source is your thing, Inkscape.

I don’t know of any app which does this other than Adobe Illustrator. It can’t be done in Paint.net, Photoshop or GIMP as those are Bitmap/Raster based editors, unlike Illustrator which is a vector based editor.

Inkscape can do it. In inkscape: “Path >> Trace Bitmap”. Works decently well.

http://www.inkscape.org/

Yah, I use Illustrator (but will try this program) to steal tattoo designs online. I download whatever size image I can get, convert it to vector, and I can blow it up to whatever size I want. I found some awesome ones to jack on deviantart.

Yeah, I’m all about Illustrator’s Live Trace feature.

Yup, Live trace is about as good as it gets. Also, automatic vector utilities are only as good as the image you’re converting. If you’ve got a crappy fax that was scanned in, you’ll get a crappy scanned in fax looking vector file out of it.

Illustrator’s livetrace is actually Adobe’s integration of their app Streamline which was really only good for very specific tasks. There are several other programs out there including a plugin for illustrator 10 called Sillouette and an application from the mid 90s called Jag (which didn’t really work).

Unfortunately, these tools are only good for very specific needs and are far from perfect, however will get the job done for about 3/4 of the people out there that need such a service. There really is no substitute for doing this stuff by hand, though.

The best uses for this would be for colorizing cartoons, screenprinting, and anything that would require a plotter (signs, flags, banners, etc).

Depending on what I’m working on I’ll sometimes decide to use SVG’s if the image isn’t too complex and would be easy enough to export etc. It’s helpful to have an SVG that you can resize however you need without any loss of quality, but with new techniques and depending on how you do this, it’s just as easy in Paint shop Pro or Photoshop.

ILLUSTRATOR is pretty much the only way to vectorize (for me). I use photoshop to clean my image, then import it to illustrator for Vetorizing.

On the newer ILLUSTRATOR programs when you have a clean and crisp image you can actually create an outline for it and vectorize it.

Just learn the Pen tool, and have patience.

You tube has a lot of great Pen tool Turtorials for vectorizing using Illustrator.

No longer “free” to download the vectorized file. Will try inkscape.