Scanning & Vectorising – What software??

[Aitor Asencor]

For Mac, the old Streamline or better Silhouette.

Aitor

[Tim Knight]

We used to have a program called SIGNUS – DOS based
was very good!
but don’t know what to investigate in regards to
scanning in black and white imaes for vector

thanks for any advice

tim knight 😕

[Paul Rollason]

Hi Tim

We scan into Photoshop and use the various tools to clean up the image.

Then we select the parts of the drawing we want using colour range if it’s a single colour or line drawings and magic wand if selecting specific parts of an image.

Then we convert the selection to a path and export it to CorelDraw for further cleaning and cutting.

If it’s a simple image we normally draw it from scratch by importing the scanned bitmap into Corel, locking that layer and drawing on a layer above.

It’s all easier to do than explain. I do have a video tutorial somewhere, I’ll try and dig it out.

Paul R(Mackerelbud Design)

[John Childs]

Although many of my younger years were spent scanning and digitising, for some reason we actually do very little of it these days. In fact I’m struggling to remember the last time I scanned something.

I suppose it could be put down to a combination of the availability of sites like “brandsoftheworld.com, file swapping here, but also an increasing instance of clients supplying vector files themselves.

Anyway, back to the question. We don’t do anything with images, scanning something would be purely for vinyl cutting, so we find that a £49 Canon scanner at 300dpi is more than adequate.

To digitise I will usually just use the scan as a template and re-draw the artwork myself but on the odd occasion where it’s better to automate the process I use Adobe Streamline.

[Alan Drury]

I use Signlab for vectorising and although it is miles better than Corel Trace it still needs editing and for some logos digitising on screen is quicker, I have to say Signlabs node editing is exceptionally easy and screen digitising is a doddle.
Alan

[John Singh]

Same thoughts as Alan

With Signlab you can import the image as a bitmap and if a scan comes out lousy you can still use the bitmap as a template to draw over the top of with signlab tools.

John