Software that converts image to vector format ?

[David Rowland]

There is, what program do you use on a regular basis?

Corel Draw has Corel Trace
Adobe Illustrator has something, not sure what but I know it can.
Adobe Photoshop, you select all the colour and then apply pen outlines (however it not designed to be illustration package)
I think there is something called Adobe Streamline .. not update on that.

90% of the time, you will find that you will draw it yourself, the only times I use a trace program is when “it doesn’t matter”, like a cartoon character with plenty of curves. Lets take a ‘I’ shape and you scanned it in, after you have traced it, you might need to sort out the ends and turn the straight bit into “straight” lines. If artwork is too small, you will get bad results.

However Corel Trace is cool these days, I still copy over everthing by hand as it is much more accurate.

[Andy Gorman]

Adobe streamline is very good, better than Coreltrace I reckon. It is a long time since I have used any autotracing software as the results are never as good as manually tracing scans. They do have their uses though, things like intricate crests, for example, where perfect lines are not necessary. You can get reasonable results from Streamline and Corel but the amount of tidying up required is often more time consuming than starting from scratch. It used to depend on the quality of the artwork you were given to start with, but anyone capable of providing a decent bromide these days will probably have it already on disk.

[John Childs]

Adobe Streamline is available as a standalone package, but from Illustrator CS2 onwards it is called Live Trace as is bundled in with the main application.

As my learned colleagues imply, vectorising software has its uses but it can take a bit of practice and experimentation to get the best out of it.

[Rodney Gold]

I also redraw by hand after importing the raster file , it makes life so much easier for future use and you get a nice clean drawing. One of the benefits of this is that you soon learn the package well and it becomes a lot easier to do. Isnt there a service here that also does it for you overnight at almost rediculously cheap money?