Web site converts photos to vectors

Stanford University's Vectormagic converts raster images into vector images. You can select high, medium, or low level processing. This is my kid's eye, on the low setting. Link (Via Finkbuilt)

[#1 posted by michaelportent , November 21, 2007 12:28 PM]

I guess it's kinda cool that you can do this online, but I can do this with digital camera pictures in Adobe Illustrator just as well with more control over the final vector output. Sorry, just nitpicking the crap out of this. =P

[#2 posted by Matt Staggs , November 21, 2007 12:33 PM]

Forgive my ignorance, but what is this good for? Seriously - not trying to be a smart alek here, but I honestly don't know.

[#3 posted by Muse , November 21, 2007 12:59 PM]

With Adobe Illustrator CS3 costing US$599, I can see the appeal of being able to do this easily online. So many people have blogs or websites these days, that it would be useful to be able to easily create vector graphics using a simple program.

[#4 posted by gabrielm , November 21, 2007 1:05 PM]

@ MATT

As the site states "Vector art is useful because it allows you to scale an image without making it blurry or pixelated."

Now, converting a photo of an eye to vector art may seem a little silly (no offense mark), but check out the logo examples on the site. They have turned the pixelated based images into items that will look as good on the side of a building as they do on stationary.

[#5 posted by dculberson , November 21, 2007 1:06 PM]

Matt, after an initial loss in fidelity due to the vector conversion process, you can then scale the image to any size / resolution without any further loss in quality.

[#6 posted by sparkdale , November 21, 2007 1:07 PM]

Matt, I convert photos to vector in order to make stencils out of them.

[#7 posted by SleighBoy , November 21, 2007 1:09 PM]

Inkscape ( http://www.inkscape.org/ ) uses Potrace (http://potrace.sourceforge.net/ ) and optionally Autotrace ( http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/ ) for it's own raster to vector. It costs 100% less than the price of Illustrator CS or Corel, a.k.a free.

It runs on *nix & win32

[#8 posted by dculberson , November 21, 2007 1:24 PM]

D'oh! Beaten to the punch by seconds. ;-)

I used the vectorization site, and it worked wonders on my company logo file. I've previously done cleanup by hand so this saved me hours of time. Awesome!!

[#9 posted by Christopher , November 21, 2007 2:46 PM]

Thank you so much! I'd seen this a few weeks ago, and didn't mark it, and was looking for it earlier today...

[#10 posted by brundlefly , November 21, 2007 2:56 PM]

I recently used this to take a puny little .gif of a logo and turn it into a usable asset for an After Effects animation. Neat stuff.

[#11 posted by Moon , November 21, 2007 3:52 PM]

What version of Illustrator do you have to have?

[#12 posted by Merlinhoot , November 21, 2007 4:50 PM]

Try rasterizing using Rasterbator.
http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/

[#13 posted by Matt Staggs , November 21, 2007 4:59 PM]

Thanks for the answers, guys! Makes sense now.

[#14 posted by The Mad Hatter , November 21, 2007 5:06 PM]

I can easily do this on Illistrator, but it is much easier for me to take up someone else's bandwith than my RAM :)

[#15 posted by Clayton Counts , November 21, 2007 7:18 PM]

Matt, conversion to vector also allows for smoother animations in programs that have 3D camera capabilities. Imagine zooming past a row of trees without that billboard-y sprite effect. Useful for game design, movies, online presentations, etc.

[#16 posted by Chorske , November 21, 2007 8:41 PM]

I've also used Flash for conversion to vector, but I don't use it if I want an exact vector version of the original image. It often yields super stylized results, which are quite pleasing for some (but not all) applications. I'll give this a whirl- thanks for the tip.

[#17 posted by Practical Archivist , November 21, 2007 9:57 PM]

I gave VectorMagic a test spin, with mixed results. It did a great job on a decent size image, but it made my simpsonized avatar look wonky (as you can see in my blog post).

I checked it out because a photo newsletter touted it as a "de-pixelation" solution. Turns out this free web app is sweet, but it's not a miracle worker.

[#18 posted by schmod , November 22, 2007 2:57 AM]

The point really isn't for depixelation. You'd be better off looking at one of the more advanced upsampling applications out there.

Genuine Fractals does a pretty good job of upsampling pixelated photos, although their algorithm isn't all that great for solid graphics.

Fortunately, VectorMagic DOES do a good job in this area, and is in many cases better than Adobe.

There are also some fairly obvious limits as to exactly how much information you can recover from a pixelated image. VectorMagic and Genuine Fractals do their magic basically by "guessing" what's between the dots, which is something that isn't at all easy to do computationally.

[#19 posted by DJ Perl , November 22, 2007 11:13 AM]

After watching "A Scanner Darkly", and videos on iPod, I would have thought that vector video was getting to be standard.


I imagine all video/graphics in the future will converge onto compressed vector formats.

[#20 posted by Nosher , November 22, 2007 11:29 AM]

It seems quite a few people looked at the Jr Frauenfelder eye and didn't bother to actually go to the VectorMagic site before posting "I can do this in illustrator" posts.

VectorMagic is making quite a splash in graphic circles because in most cases it is far superior to the output from Illustrator. There's a screen cast you can watch at the site and the page Schmod linked to in #18 shows just how good it is with solid graphics - which is what it is designed for.

I use this now instead of LiveTrace and I would be very surprised if Adobe hadn't already put out the feelers to get this into CS4.

[#21 posted by Silva , November 22, 2007 5:13 PM]

I'll give it a shot one of these days. I'm generally more fond of tracing images myself when it comes to logos, but this could be of some use for some of the graphic work I'm doing now...

[#22 posted by The Mad Hatter , November 23, 2007 2:47 AM]

I did play with it a bit and I do think it is very similar Live Trace still (albeit much simpler). You can do virtually anything with live trace, provided you have a powerful enough computer, My computer is my Dad's former work computer which works on photoshop all day, so it is built to take on heavy tasks such as really complex live tracing. Still, if you want to make a flash or something, I think this is more useful, where live trace is better if you just want to be impressed with the results (a 150 color vector is NOT good for a flash document).

[#23 posted by elNico , November 23, 2007 5:42 AM]

@Nosher Couldn't agree more...I've tried all the standard illustration program's offerings over the past 10 years or so in regards to bitmap>vector.

Nothing has come remotely close to recognising actual important shapes in a bitmap vs detail noise as this flex app.

The editor to refine the results is just pure simplicity.

I guess for Flash designers this would also offer a nice performance increase due to the reduced number of curves.