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We have great success hand drawing logos and then scanning the finished product into our production software. However, that process is very time consuming. What do you do to reduce that transition time. We have Adobe 9, Corel 9, Flexi 5.8, and Omega 2.0. However, we rarely use Corel or Flexi. What are we missing??
""Good judgment comes from experience; and a lot of that comes from bad judgment" - Will Rogers Posts: 3485 | From: Beautiful Newaygo, Michigan | Registered: Mar 2003
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I find Corel Trace works as well as any of them, I have tried streamline.
It's a question of getting familiar with all features in the software and realizing it's limits, and learning to work around those limits. Before tracing it's benificial to enhance the contrast of the scan, and if it's a single color, changing the scan mode to 1 bit line art (b/w) makes life a lot easier. I usually trace in advanced outline mode, accurate setting, and then reduce nodes in Coreldraw as needed. If you are tracing a multicolor graphic in color mode, reduce the 'max colors' setting as much as possible.
-------------------- Mike O'Neill
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value. - Arthur C. Clarke
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In Flexi 5.8, you have one of the best vector editing applications to ever come along ..... and the autotracing is pretty good as well.
What we like to do is:
1. Scan the drawing and autotrace it.
2. Delete the bitmap leaving the new vectors.
3. Duplicate the new vectors in place by Selecting All; Control +9 (Move Command); click Copy button without entering any new position; and finally Make Guide (under the Layout menu).
You now have your autotrace sitting on top of a duplicate set of vectors shown in light gray which are locked. You can cleanup the nodes and paths and see exactly where your original path was.
-------------------- Fred Weiss Allied Computer Graphics, Inc. 4620 Lake Worth Road Lake Worth, FL 33463 561 649-6300 allcompu@allcompu.com Posts: 427 | From: Lake Worth, Florida | Registered: Feb 2003
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Eurovector does a nice job. In addition to scan & trace, you can digitize over top of artwork, quite simply once you understand how. Best price is at Summa (a Letterville Merchant).
-------------------- Bill Cosharek Bill Cosharek Signs N.Huntingdon,Pa
bcosharek@juno.com Posts: 703 | From: N.Huntingdon, Pa, USA | Registered: Dec 1999
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I agree with Fred we use Flexi for tracing all the time works great you need to play with your trace settings to figure out the best to use they will vary from job to job I will usually do more than one trace if it does not turn out to your liking the first time just move the trace or the bitmap to a new location on the screen change your settings and trace again, this way you can look at several traces and pick the best one to start doing your clean up on.
-------------------- Dennis Raap Raap Signs Posts: 839 | From: Coopersville, MI | Registered: Feb 2003
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for the money....STREAMLINE 4.0. is easy ,simply and does great work.
-------------------- joe pribish-A SIGN MINT 2811 longleaf Dr. pensacola, fl 32526 850-637-1519 BEWARE THE TRUTH.....YOU MAY NOT LIKE WHAT YOU FIND Posts: 11582 | From: pensacola, fl. usa | Registered: Nov 1998
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Vinyl Master Pro has a great trace program.. I use photoshop to scan. then export to VMP as a bmp file... works best if you turn the contrast up a lot then trace in VMP and edit the traced curves in VMP as well...they have lots of good editing features and the program is very stable...plus its price makes it a great bargain
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When the scanner's software is done with the scan, it jumps directly into the Sign Wizard layout window. Sign Wizard traces/vectorizes it and I clean it up with the vector editing tools. Does a good job.
-------------------- Wayne Webb Webb Signworks Chipley, FL 850.638.9329 wayne@webbsignworks.com Posts: 7404 | From: Chipley,Florida,United States | Registered: Oct 1999
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hey wayne....little secret...sign wizard uses STREAMLINE, embedded in their sign program......SIGN WIZARD 4 was for sure, when you would open the trace module it looked identical to STREAMLINE.
[ July 11, 2003, 06:30 PM: Message edited by: old paint ]
-------------------- joe pribish-A SIGN MINT 2811 longleaf Dr. pensacola, fl 32526 850-637-1519 BEWARE THE TRUTH.....YOU MAY NOT LIKE WHAT YOU FIND Posts: 11582 | From: pensacola, fl. usa | Registered: Nov 1998
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We use Imagaro Z. Better tracing & cleanup tools than most programs. Nothing beats it in dealing with text. It will automatically identify typefaces & replaces scanned text right in the logo.
-------------------- Steve Boek BOEK Mfg./ProCut-Plus.com Posts: 5 | From: Portland, Oregon | Registered: Feb 2002
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When cleaning up poor scans of business cards for screen printing I found the following: 1) Casmate and Inspire both work perfectly with anything you throw at it. 2) Steamline 4 only works with really good scans (it was so bad that I deleted it). 3) Corel Trace 10-12 works well for good high contrast scans. 4) Signlab 6.1,& 7 works about as well as Corel and has very nice vector editing. 5) Omega 2, in my experience is not much better than Streamline.
ernie
-------------------- Ernie Balch Balch Signs 1045 Raymond Rd Malta, NY 518-885-9899 Posts: 405 | From: Malta, NY | Registered: Jan 2003
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Typically, it's the scanner setting that make the differecne.
Most scanners have options to bump up the quality of the scan or to do them in higher resolutions to maintain detail. The upside is a cleaner scan, the downside is larger file size in memory.
I do an occasional hand drawn cartoon in black & white, scan it, and use Corel Photopaint to clean the edges up and convert them to .tif files. I then run them through Adobe Streamline 4.0. which creates the art as an .AI file. Import into Coreldraw, break it apart (ungroup command), seperate the areas needed and group them for each color. Cutting directly from Coreldraw, the end result is a solid black base piece and the colors to overlay onto it. If the design is dificult to line up by eye, a few registration marks come in handy. I usually just make circles so they are easier to remove when done.
hope this helps... Rapid
BTW: Using the same process is great for tshirt printing. You can cut all the color seperations in black and apply them to clear acetate and burn screens directly from them.
-------------------- Ray Rheaume Rapidfire Design 543 Brushwood Road North Haverhill, NH 03774 rapidfiredesign@hotmail.com 603-787-6803
I like my paint shaken, not stirred. Posts: 5648 | From: North Haverhill, New Hampshire | Registered: Apr 2003
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The absolute best, nothing on the market compares to it............CASMATE!!!!!
-------------------- Tony Vickio The World Famous Vickio Signs 3364 Rt.329 Watkins Glen, NY 14891 t30v@vickiosigns.com 607-535-6241 http://www.vickiosigns.com Posts: 1063 | From: Watkins Glen, New York | Registered: Sep 2001
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THe best tracing software I have found is the new Flexi 7.5, it does an excellent job on even a small icon from a website... And most of the times, the curves are ready to use and no cleaning / correction needed at all.
-------------------- Peter Xing peter@wonderfulgraphics.com Wonderful Signs & Graphics 55 Chrystie Street New York NY 212 431 5957 Posts: 43 | From: New York NY | Registered: Jul 2003
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Sign Wizard does a great job. An added bonus for me is that I don't lose or misplace a file either! Everything is in the one program and while there might be better scan/vectors programs out there, the ease of having it all in one is fantastic.
-------------------- Michael A Latham Tee's Me Shirt & Sign 16462 Jefferson Davis Highway Colonial Heights Va. 804-835-3299 signdogopie@aol.com Posts: 379 | From: Colonial Heights, Virginia | Registered: Feb 2004
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Hi, I'm new here. I scan with AGFA scanwise. I just got a new (to me) software called "silhouette", and so far I love that. Silhouette is an adobe illustrator plugin that makes pixel art into vector art. (it is available as a stand-alone also) For simple b/w art you can just open your raster image in illustrator, select the silhouette tool, and click on the image and - poof - it's a vector. For simple color you can convert to grayscale, and separate the lighter or darker gays using blending options, copy each shade to individual layers, then vectorize each layer. For a complex color piece I guess I would separate colors to different layers in photoshop, then import each layer to illustrator to vectorize. I used flash's "trace-bitmap" function before I had silhouette. There is no comparison. There are some more complicated features to it, but I have not used it enough yet to know about them all. Silhouette has an intuitive color tracing feature, but I have only had it for a week now, so I haven't figured that out quite yet.
-------------------- Jim Brannen San Diego, Ca. surfingpl@aol.com Posts: 7 | From: San Diego, California | Registered: Apr 2004
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