• I want to thank all the members that have upgraded your accounts. I truly appreciate your support of the site monetarily. Supporting the site keeps this site up and running as a lot of work daily goes on behind the scenes. Click to Support Signs101 ...

need a good company to make my design into a vector format

signdesign

New Member
Does anyone have a great place that does wonderful work to change a design into a vector format for eps flexi. I have a design a company wants somes signs from but it would take me way to long to scan and clean up. Please reply soon. Thanks
Karen
 
I just sent two files to Viking to convert yesterday and had them back this morning. They were great! I would highly reccommend them.

Steve Shearer
Applied Graphics
Cody, Wyoming
 

signdesign

New Member
program

Isn't there a program out there where you can scan a picture in and click vectorize it and it comes out perfect no touching up. That would be awesome. Anyone know of any. I ended up sending it over to vikingart to see what they say.
Thanks
karen
 

WVB

New Member
No, there is no program that is perfect. You can use Flexi and tweak form within or export to Illustrator and use path/simplify and tweak from there. Adobe Streamline is another.
 

Fred Weiss

Merchant Member
To get nearly perfect results with black and white artwork, you need Photoshop and Streamline. You scan a high quality image at very high rez (Vikings Arts specializes in vectorizing low rez poor quality images) so you end up with a large black and white at 300 DPI which looks great. Then you autotrace it in Streamline.

Despite all the advertising to the contrary, there is no single solution for acceptable or better results in autotracing applications. As with most things, the more skill, experience and tools you have, the better the job you can do. Acquiring the right tools to handle most autotracing needs along with adequate editing and touch up tools runs up into the several thousands of dollars, lots of time learning and practicing, and the occasional job that can only be done by hand tracing.

You also need to get good at identifying type because not autotracing application out there will capture the subtleties of type faces.

You can get a lot of work done by Viking Arts for what you would need to put forth to never have to hand trace and get good results autotracing.
 

David Snider

New Member
signdesign said:
Isn't there a program out there where you can scan a picture in and click vectorize it and it comes out perfect no touching up. That would be awesome. Anyone know of any. I ended up sending it over to vikingart to see what they say.
Thanks
karen


Yep! Doesn't your computer have an "EASY' button? Mine does! Boy! Is it sweet! :)
 

Fred Weiss

Merchant Member
bill_gates.gif
Take it from the Big Guy. It used to be called Delete but it is now used for the easy cleanup feature as well. Just Select All and press Delete if you don't have an Easy key.
 

jimdes

New Member
A little off the subject, but I still have my "Panic Button" on my keyboard from the late eighties. Originally installed on my Amiga 2000, I'd like to find a new one because this one is barely legible anymore.
 

Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
Autotracing functions in Adobe Streamline or Flexi and others are okay for rough comp purposes, but little else. If you want well vectorized stuff, nothing outperforms vectorizing by hand.

My tool of choice for any auto tracing functions is a two step process in Adobe Photoshop. Use the the Color Range function to develop a selection on a high rez scan (adjust the fuzziness slider to tweak the result). Once the resulting selection is made, open the paths palette and select "make work path". Adjust the pixel tolerance and hit OK.

Granted, this method is not absolutely perfect, but I often get more satisfactory results than what I achieve with Streamline. The big advantage is all your paths are closed loops. Streamline tends to create all sorts of open path trash.

For doing things the hard way (manually vectorizing), I use a combination of Photoshop's pen tool functions and CorelDRAW. Photoshop's pen tool and keyboard shortcuts make accurately digitizing "organic" elements a relatively fast process. At least it is far faster than trying to do the same thing in Corel, Illustrator or Freehand. I'll defer to Corel when digitizing more technical things where paths have to fall on certain geometric alignments. Out of the three drawing apps Corel is by far the best for this since its on screen preview is much faster than Illustrator or Freehand.
 

Fred Weiss

Merchant Member
I get excellent results from Streamline without anything in the way of open shapes ... but I first do a thorough cleanup in Photoshop. To accomplish this I recorded some actions and assigned them to function keys.

Basically the way they work is I scan at a very high resolution so that I end up with an image in the range of 6000 pixels tall or wide. The image is moved to it's own layer.

Next all non-image parts of the scan are selected with the magic wand and the first action is run. This action expands the selection by 3 to 5 pixels (depending on the edge quality of the original art), smooths the selection by two pixels and then deletes whatever pixels are within the selection.

The second action selects the artwork on its layer and expands the selection by 3 to 5 pixels, smooths the selection and fills the selection with 100% black.

The overall effect is a nice smooth and well defined edge which Streamline loves.

Flatten the layers, save as TIF and you're ready to trace it in Streamline.
 
Top