Strange Duck - Tech Talk in Plain English

Vector Magic takes bitmapped images and turns them into beautiful vector images.

Huh? What’s that mean?

Well, very simply, it takes photos or other complicated graphics and turns them into line drawings. Line drawings that can be stretched to infinity.

That’s the original photo on the top left. The other 3 squares have been traced using Vector Magic’s three settings - high, medium and low.

Yup. A Stanford University team has developed a tool that makes it super easy to do, and does it better than most other auto-tracers, like the one in Adobe Illustrator.

Basically, there are 2 ways a computer can draw pictures:

1. with tiny little squares, or pixels, called bitmap, or raster.
2. with a command that says something like “draw a circle and make it red with a circumference of 10 pixels. ” This is called a vector image.

The trick is to know when to use which one.

For example, ever try to take a jpeg and make it bigger? It turns all squarish and jaggedy - or pixelated - meaning you start seeing the individual pixels the image is made of. Now if you shrink the same image, it will get all blurry.

That’s not good for some things, such as logos. For those, you want them to be either teeny weeny, or something to paste on the side of a skyscraper. That means you need a vector image.

Now I can’t tell you the number of times I have received bitmaps instead of vectors when someone sends me their logo. This can be a big headache, especially if it’s sitting on a background colour.

Not anymore. If i get one of those nasty things, I will shoot it up to “Vector Magic: The Online Tool for Precision Vectorization” and change it to a more usable form for logos.

In fact I had to use this myself. I never made a proper logo for Bitter Tonic as I was in a big rush to get content up, and so a friend just made a great header for me. And being too busy, I never got around to doing the work. So I tested this by uploading a TIFF of my logo to Vector Magic.

I gotta hand it to them, it makes traces beautifully and the site is easy to use too. And even keeps your photos stored online for a whole month. Check out the difference. The top is a bitmap.

Magnifico!

Did I mention how fast it is?

I wish this team would develop for my ridiculously not-easy-to-use cell phone.

Click here for great tracing by Vector Magic

Tags: free tools, online tool, vector, auto tracer, Vector Magic, line drawing, trace, logos, Stanford University