I have a friend with a very small silk screenign shop in her basement who has been sending me things to vectorize for her. I am trying to find her an inexpensive program to buy that will do this for her. Anyone know of one?
Posted by Don Coplen (Member # 127) on :
Bobbie, I'm not sure there's even an expensive program that does a good job of that. At least "good" in the way needed for a screen printer.
I've read here that there are one or two places that will vectorize for next to nothing, but don't know why you'd want to pass off work you're doing yourself now. Wouldn't make a lot of sense at all to throw work out the door.
Posted by David Harding (Member # 108) on :
Corel does an "adequate" job in vectorizing in its "Trace Bitmap" option, which should come up automatically when you click on a bitmap and have the Property Bar checked to be on by default.
If you right mouse on the top menu bar a dialog will come up with the various toolboxes and menu bars available. Make sure Property Bar is on. I don't know if it is on by default in Corel but it's a very useful tool.
I put "adequate" in quotes because it depends on the quality of the bitmap and the settings you use... and how picky you are... or how late in the evening you've been working on it... or how frustrated you've gotten in trying to do it...
Posted by Guy H. J. Hilliard (Member # 2529) on :
Bobbie;
I use Imagaro Professional Z and I find it to be considerably better than Corel trace (12 through X6 anyways), not perfect but much better. Not too sure if it qualifies as "inexpensive" at $197 for the the non-professional version, but it does the same job as the professional ($287) version with some limitations related to font recognition and substitution. I think it is worth every penny I paid for it.
If you want you can send me a couple of sample jpg's and I will gladly run them through the trace for you to show you how well it works.
Posted by shirley houston (Member # 4021) on :
take a look at Vector Magic. $7.99 a month for unlimited uploads. I recently started using them. The vectorization is almost instantaneous, but if needed you can have hand drawn. Worth taking a look at to see if your friend would be happy.
Posted by Dave Grundy (Member # 103) on :
Bobbie...Most "trace" programs will do an adequate job, as David H. said.
BUT, as Don says, why turn away work that you can do yourself?
Hand vectorizing is the best bet, but it takes time to do accurately. Don's mention of the online services is correct. They seem to do a good job and at very low prices. I guess those offshore labourers work pretty cheap?
Posted by old paint (Member # 549) on :
corel does a good job on most...AS LONG AS YOU DO SIMPLE TRACES. myself, i will take a bitmap, reprint it as large on an 8.5 X 11 sheet and reprint it. then i take a sheet of tracing paper, lay & tape it over that. then i hand trace with a NEW sharpie, only the lines i want for cutting. now i take my hand drawn sheet into the scanner, into corel, then TRACE that one. you may need some cleanup, but you will get what you wanted. the only other program i use, it may not work past XP, is ADOBE STREAMLINE 4.0. it is an old program but does a great job. and the thing i like about it you edit the bitmap before you trace it, then if you took out a line or broke a line you can go back into it and redraw and fix it.
Posted by Russ McMullin (Member # 5617) on :
Vector Magic is awesome. It does a better job of automated vectoring than anything else I have seen.
Posted by Mikes Mischeif (Member # 1744) on :
Vector Doctor is My Guy. He does all the work in Ohio, not overseas as Dave stated. I look at it like this: If your shop rate is $100/hr and you spend more than 4 minutes completly vecotrizing something that can be done for $7 bucks, you're not thinking staight. If a vector program is $150 bucks, you would have to do 21 jobs to just pay for the program, let alone the time learning to figure it out.
[ June 20, 2013, 09:03 PM: Message edited by: Mikes Mischeif ]
Posted by Si Allen (Member # 420) on :
+1 on the Vector Doctor!
Posted by Nikki Goral (Member # 7844) on :
I have an old Streamline file Works great and converts to an Illustrator file.
Posted by Don Coplen (Member # 127) on :
Either vectorizing programs have become wildly improved in the past couple years, or I'm just too darn picky.
Also, I sure wouldn't turn a paying customer on to a cut rate vectorizer, no matter how good they are. We've all got to eat and the price of food isn't going anywhere but up!
Posted by Dave Sherby (Member # 698) on :
Imagro Z makes Steamline look like a freeware app. Even so, I just had a jpg file sent to me that would have taken hours to get perfect and artworksource.com did it overnight for $15. Then my customer wanted fades in certain areas. They added the fades, again overnight at no extra charge. You could easily charge a customer $30 to $50 and not have to do a thing.
Posted by Michael O'Regan (Member # 7751) on :
I have vector magic offline version and it is the business! I have also used the vectordoctor online and he is excellent, very fast turnaround!
Posted by Bobbie Rochow (Member # 3341) on :
Wow!!! Thank you ALL! Don, I am considering your opinion, it does make sense, but right now I am really super busy, every minute seems to be counted. I might tell her about Vector Doctor & see what happens.
Posted by Elaine Beauchemin (Member # 136) on :
Bobbie, even if you are too busy. You can take the file send it to vector DR ... wait a bit send the vectorized result to your customer with a bill... you keep the customer happy and pay your bills
[ June 25, 2013, 12:46 PM: Message edited by: Elaine Beauchemin ]
Posted by Curtis hammond (Member # 2170) on :
Right on wit hthe vector doctor.
I have yet to find any program that will do an adequate job of a trace. All of the traced or converted files need touch up work when done.
It is much faster for me to redo it myself or even better to send it to vector doctor.
Posted by Don Coplen (Member # 127) on :
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Works great and converts to an Illustrator file.