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Not all of you will have heard of this, but there is a process that is done in the graphic design and print industries called 'vectorization.' It is also sometimes called 'tracing' and the prefix 'auto-' is sometimes stuck in front of either word.

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Both the online and the desktop editions work on both Mac and PC. It is clear that they have put a lot of time into distilling the interface down to the bare essentials.īeyond the first two conversions, which are free, you can either buy a subscription at $7.95/month, or the desktop application at $295. One of the nicest things about VM from my perspective is the care they have taken in the design of the graphical user interface. But if you even need to vectorize a few images per month, I bet it is still profitable to sign up for a subscription or buy the desktop application.

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They have priced this as a professional tool, which makes sense considering that it is mostly professionals who have ever even heard of vectorization. In fact, on digitally rasterized bitmaps, I bet it does better than most humans would do in recovering the original vector image.

But it does work really well on medium- and high-resolution images without too much noise. It doesn't work on everything, and despite coming out of the artificial intelligence lab, it is not nearly as clever as a human. It works much better than existing tools. Some guys in the artificial intelligence lab in the computer science department came up with this completely new way to vectorize images.

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VM is a software product and online service that grew out of a Stanford University research project. That has changed with the release of Vector Magic.

For a long time now, there have been software tools to help in this process, but all of them have done such a poor job that most people prefer to just redraw the art themselves rather than clean up the messy result produced by the software. Take 2Įver need to convert from a bitmap image to vector art? Say a client gives you their logo as a BMP or JPG but you need it in EPS or SVG to do your job.

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Delivering it online is also a nice way to let people try it out without having to even download any software. Overall, Vector Magic has an easier interface and much better results than any other vectorization tool on the market. If you do any serious amount of vectorization, this software is well worth the price. They do offer educational discounts for the desktop application. After that, you can either buy a subscription for $7.95/month or buy the desktop application for $295. When you first come to the site they give you two free conversions.

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In contrast, the other tools use confusing dialog windows with technical control knobs like 'path fitting,' 'minimum area,' 'blur,' and 'corner angle.' Not only are these unclear in their meaning and purpose, they also don't correspond to the types of thing that the user wants to control, so the process of finding the best settings (which still might not yield a very good result) can be time-consuming and frustrating. It uses a simple wizard that guides you through the process, asking simple multiple choice questions about your input image and your desired output. Vector Magic's user interface is much more intuitive and slick than the other tools. Take a look at this link to see some comparisons between VM and the other major players: It also makes many fewer mistakes with most images, and doesn't look as wobbly as Adobe's LiveTrace or as faceted as Corel's PowerTrace. Neither of them compare to the quality or ease of use of Vector Magic.Ĭompared to the other tools, Vector Magic is best at capturing small details, especially in anti-aliased logos and other similar images. The biggest name tools out there today are Adobe's LiveTrace, which is built into Illustrator, and Corel's PowerTrace, which is built into CorelDraw.

It is traditionally done by hand, with the artist carefully redrawing every detail, but for a couple decades now, there have been a number of attempts to produce an automatic computer tool for performing these conversions. For photos, vectorization is more of a stylistic effect, somewhat like the rotoscoping effect in the recent movies 'A Scanner Darkly' and 'Waking Life'. Vector art can be scaled to any size without any pixelation or blurriness. For logos and other digital drawings, this is useful if you only have a bitmap available, but need a vector version of it in order to print it, scale it, or edit it.

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