Archive for the ‘Auto-Tracing Programs’ Category
BATH, UK – British researchers have solved the problem of video scaling by developing a new video codec that uses vectors instead of pixels for continuous tone images.
Conventional digital video is represented by a grid of pixels, which are not scalable and have to be rendered to a fixed size, thus limiting the distribution of digital video films to the formats for which they have been prepared. For example, standard TV is rendered at 768×576, HD TV at 1920×1024 and Internet and mobile phone video at anywhere from 384×256 on up. Read Full Story
I have received many emails re: raster to vector conversion. I have always used Adobe Streamline in the past, but Adobe has discontinued Streamline and replaced it with the new tracing tool in Illustrator starting with version CS2 and going forward. Fortunately, there is a free Open Source application called AutoTrace that is available (ref: http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/ “AutoTrace – converts bitmap to vector graphics”). I have been following the development of AutoTrace for a couple of years, now. It has been available for the Windows platform for awhile, now, but it was difficult for the average user to configure all the open source parts of the program to get it to work.
Now there is an online tool that anyone with an Internet connection can access at the RO I T Systems website: http://www.roitsystems.com/cgi-bin/autotrace/tracer.pl. Simply upload your raster image and the program will convert your raster image into a vector file in SVG format. You can save the SVG file to your drive, then open it in Illustrator (CS or later version) and be able to make edits or save it as Illustrator AI or EPS format.
AutoTrace is also available for the Macintosh in the program Delineate. A Mac OS X version of Delineate 0.5 has been bundled together with potrace and AutoTrace. It is available as a single Mac dmg file. It is available here: http://delineate.sourceforge.net/download.html. This is the link to the Delineate main page: http://delineate.sourceforge.net/.