Jack Leckliter
New Member
Hi all,
Thought this might be of interest--just $10 shareware. Not any sort of product that would compete with Vector Doctor, but intriguing nonetheless. Converts raster images to vector patterns of configurable halftone-like dot shapes/densities. (See http://www.lostminds.com/content/frameset.html.)
Gave it a try of about 25-30 minutes and it's fun to play with and seems to work okay--with the inevitable issues of a v1.0 product, a few interface design thingies mainly--but not sure how/why I'd use it exactly. The number of paths it can generate as you would expect is potentially very large which could be an issue.
For patterns in the same ballpark as conventional halftones, which is what Vectoraster currently generates, I believe after trying it out we probably get more of the type of control we need for silkscreen printing purposes with a halftone screen from the RIP or generated via Photoshop. (Of course, I may be overlooking something.)
What would be interesting however would be lots of different stylized "arty" types of vector halftone screens, like parallel lines, etc. The type of thing you'd use for posterization effects and the like, with better control and more options than Photoshop gives you in their convert-to-bitmap-from-grayscale dialog.
One problem in screen-printing we run into with our setup (license plates printed with 230-mesh screens and Nazdar 9700 series inks) is with traditional halftone-like patterns at say, 45 lpi, we have to stop and clean the silkscreen every 40-50 prints to keep things working well, so we avoid halftones whenever humanly possible. With further development this little app might skirt around those issues or perhaps provide some interesting alternatives in some situations.
If anyone can see some applications I'm not envisioning, though, would like to hear, because Vectoraster is intriguing, and I personally like to end up with a pure vector file if possible.
--Jack
Thought this might be of interest--just $10 shareware. Not any sort of product that would compete with Vector Doctor, but intriguing nonetheless. Converts raster images to vector patterns of configurable halftone-like dot shapes/densities. (See http://www.lostminds.com/content/frameset.html.)
Gave it a try of about 25-30 minutes and it's fun to play with and seems to work okay--with the inevitable issues of a v1.0 product, a few interface design thingies mainly--but not sure how/why I'd use it exactly. The number of paths it can generate as you would expect is potentially very large which could be an issue.
For patterns in the same ballpark as conventional halftones, which is what Vectoraster currently generates, I believe after trying it out we probably get more of the type of control we need for silkscreen printing purposes with a halftone screen from the RIP or generated via Photoshop. (Of course, I may be overlooking something.)
What would be interesting however would be lots of different stylized "arty" types of vector halftone screens, like parallel lines, etc. The type of thing you'd use for posterization effects and the like, with better control and more options than Photoshop gives you in their convert-to-bitmap-from-grayscale dialog.
One problem in screen-printing we run into with our setup (license plates printed with 230-mesh screens and Nazdar 9700 series inks) is with traditional halftone-like patterns at say, 45 lpi, we have to stop and clean the silkscreen every 40-50 prints to keep things working well, so we avoid halftones whenever humanly possible. With further development this little app might skirt around those issues or perhaps provide some interesting alternatives in some situations.
If anyone can see some applications I'm not envisioning, though, would like to hear, because Vectoraster is intriguing, and I personally like to end up with a pure vector file if possible.
--Jack