What is Vector Magic? Ideal Image System proudly endorses our friends at Vector Magic. How many times has a customer brought you and image from a business card? A low-rez .jpg from the web? These images can take hours to clean and correct. Customers don’t understand and are upset at art charges for your services, all while trying to make their bad art printable. Vector Magic provides vectorization software and services cheaper, faster and better than you can do in your own art department. Vector Magic's flagship service is the online auto tracer available at www.vectormagic.com use promo code IIS120 for a Free Trial. Vector Magic converts bitmap (aka raster) images into vector images through an easy-to-use web interface - just upload your image and it will guide you through the process. The conversion process as such is called tracing or vectorization and is something that has historically been done mostly by hand. An automated tool like the Vector Magic web service can make this otherwise tedious task quick and painless. How to use Vector Magic? Using Vector Magic is super-simple:
The sections below go more in-depth than the online wizard, and it can be helpful to have read them to get more background information about what the different choices mean. Vector Magic distinguishes between three fundamentally different input image types, and this is the first question asked in the vectorization wizard. These image types are:
The reason Vector Magic distinguishes between these three categories is that they require very different types of processing. Photos are images with colors that change gradually across the image, and where the original was usually not an actual piece of vector art, but is rather a source of inspiration for making a new piece of vector art. Photos are normally traced to create some form of effect, perhaps to use as the background for a larger composition, or to extract some key shape element. Photos normally do not have sharp corners and since an artistic effect is desired, there's no single correct answer, but rather many quite possibly acceptable answers.
This is the most common type of logo by far - in fact, if you're unsure, this is probably the correct answer (you can always reprocess your image with different settings, so don't be afraid to experiment if the results don't come out right the first time). Logo with Blending Logos with blending have very important information captured in the blending - if you look closely by zooming in in the vectorization wizard, you will see that the pixels on the shape boundaries are colored in proportion to which shape they belong the most to. When zoomed out, this is what makes the curved sections of this type of logos look smooth. If there is no blending, the curved sections usually end up looking a little jagged. Check the tips & tricks, comparisons, samples, uses for vector images, vector image resources, and more company information.
How is Vector Magic different? Vector Magic is different from other auto-tracing tools in several ways:
Easier user interface with less trial-and-error. If you've used other tracing tools, you have probably noticed that they have tons of confusing options and settings, and require you to more or less randomly try different combinations of these in the frustrating search for a passable result. With Vector Magic on the other hand, all you need to do is answer a couple of simple questions and that's it. In case you're not satisfied with the result, there is even a troubleshooting guide to help you resolve the problem - again phrased as simple questions, not confusing options with unclear effects. Vector Magic saves you time and frustration, while giving you better results. The difference between bitmap/raster images and vector images is that the former are described by pixels - squares of color - while the latter are described by shapes - a mathematical description of the image that can be scaled without becoming blurry or "pixelated" (that blocky look that bitmap/raster images so often get when scaled up). Vector images are used in most aspects of graphic design and are the preferred format for printing, both on paper and on clothes. The reason for this is that while a bitmap/raster image can look great on the screen, which usually has a resolution of about 72 pixels/dots per inch (DPI), it will normally have to be scaled by a factor of 8 or more when printed since modern printers routinely produce resolutions of 600 pixels/dots per inch. Vector images can handle this type of scaling without any problems while bitmap/raster images struggle with it. Vector images are also used on the web in for example flash animations. If you'd like to vectorize an image, simply upload it on the front page. This will start an interactive web application that will guide you through the vectorization process. You'll get to answer a few simple questions about your image (what type of image it is, what colors you want in the result and such). For your convenience we fill out most of the answers for you, all you need to do is verify that you're happy with them. After the vectorization completes you can review the result within the same web application. You can zoom and pan around the image, and either compare the original and the result side-by-side or flip between them overlaid. If you're happy with the result and would like to download it, you can exchange 1 token for enabling downloading of it. Vector Magic uses the blending to make the vector result resemble the input image as closely as possible. As you can see in the figure above, Vector Magic traces out the precise location of the edge of the shape. This is something no other tracing program can do consistently, and is one of the things that set Vector Magic's results apart. Since Vector Magic makes the most of the information in the blending, you normally do not want to posterize your input images, as is common with many other tools. Instead, specify the colors Vector Magic should use to both get the information in the blending and limit the colors present in the output. Whenever you convert a vector image to bitmap format, you should make sure to enable the blending (also known as "anti-aliasing") in order to get the best looking result possible.
Logos without blending Logos without blending have abrupt edges between the shapes in the image (see the example image). This type of image unfortunately contains much less information about the details of the shapes than a corresponding image with blending, which means that it's much harder to recover the fine details from the original. Notice the distinct difference at the edges of the color boundaries, when compared to the logo with blending. Vector Magic uses special techniques to get the most out of these images, and the techniques differ from those used in the with-blending case. It is therefore crucial to pick the right option, but if you're uncertain you can always just try one and then the other. Logos that look like they have meaningful blending, but actually don't.
Logo without and with meaningful blending. Note how the blending in the left image doesn't give a very meaningful cue to the curvature of the shape. A particularly tricky case is when an image looks like it has blended edges, but the blending is meaningless. This can happen when shrinking an image that did not use to have blending, but it's shrunk by only a small amount (e.g. to 90% of it's original size - if you shrink it by a lot, e.g. to 50% of it's original size, then the blending starts becoming more meaningful; it's a gradual scale). In this case the blending does not give meaningful clues as to where the boundaries should be drawn, so the best option to use is usually "logo without blending". You'll want to make sure to limit the colors used, to get as much as possible of the noise out of the image - the blending effectively becomes noise in this case.
Quality level - Logos For logos, Vector Magic allows you to specify the quality level of the input image. This quality level is then used to tune the processing to get the most out of the bitmap original. Impact of the quality level setting on the shape boundaries
This allows you to recover the finer details of your bitmap original.
This allows you to reject most of the noise in the bitmap original, while still staying faithful to the main features present in it. There's a tradeoff between rejecting noise and preserving detail. Experiment a little - you can use the buttons in the troubleshooting guide to quickly reprocess your image to see what the different settings do. This will let you quickly build up a feel for what type of image works best with what type of quality setting. For photos, Vector Magic allows you to specify the level of detail you would like to see in the output. A higher detail setting means that there will be more shapes in the output, and these shapes will follow the color contours more closely. Vector images with more shapes take up more space, take longer to load and render, and are more difficult to manipulate, so it's a tradeoff between simplicity and fidelity. Medium is the recommended
setting, as it normally gives a very good balance between looking like the original and having a reasonable number of shapes.
Specifying the colors The point of specifying what colors to use, is that it helps Vector Magic produce a cleaner result that is guaranteed to have no extra colors in it. This can really help in removing crud in noisy images. If your logo has 12 or fewer colors in it, you pretty much always want to use this option. Specifying the colors appropriately can mean the difference between a poor and a directly usable result It can also be used to achieve an effect for logos with many colors, where excluding some of the colors can create a somewhat posterized feel to the result.
To help you pick the colors, Vector Magic generates a set of proposed palettes, with 2 to 12 colors in them. It then guesses which palettes are the most likely, and grays the others out a little to help you with the selection. You can pick one of the generated palettes and just go with that, or start with one of them and then modify it to suit your needs. The modification is very easy, you just select the color you want to change and then eye-drop the color you want from the image. We want you to be able to know what you're going to get before you need to download anything, so the vectorization wizard has a powerful review interface. You can pan and zoom in your image, and review the result vs original side-by-side or on top, flipping back and forth between them. Go to: www.vectormagic.com use promo code IIS120 for a Free Trial |
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