Vector Magic

I came across a web based application called Vector Magic a couple of weeks ago, and have found myself coming back to the tool more and more as of late. It seems to be a project of the Stanford University, and is hosted on their site. Basically the application offers the ability to vectorize raster images, or trace them.

This comes in handy for a few different situations - maybe you have a logo that you would like to resize without the quality loss experienced with raster based resizing. Maybe you want the vector look as an effect for an image, or maybe you want to try and vectorize some photographs just for fun, or to see what they look like. You may have tried vectorizing images through Macromedia Flash before, but Vector Magic offers greater control over the process.

Basically you upload a picture, and it will attempt to guess the pictures contents - whether its a photograph or a logo, and whether it has antialiasing at all. Also you can let it know how many colors are in the picture, and the relative quality of the image. These things all go towards a better vectorized result. After the application has done its thing, you can do minor touchups of the image or try processing it using different settings. When you are happy with the result, you can save the image as either vector based (SVG, EPS etc formats) or back as a raster (PNG, JPG etc). Quite a handy tool.

I recently used the program to Vectorize the mountain range in my logo, as for fun I decided to try and do up a 4K resolution version of it. Took a lot more time than I expected, let me tell you. Try giving Vector Magic a spin.