Have you seen Vector Magic yet?

There has been a bit of buzz around this new online program that takes a raster (pixel-based) image and converts it to vector shapes. I thought I’d test it out to see how it held up.

Results on Photography

I took the following flower image and tested it at both medium and high photo settings.

I think the results were pretty good with both settings. The medium one is a stylized, Illustrator-looking image, while the results of the high quality render look much closer to the original photo.

There are options to edit the results of the “vectorization” while still on the Vector Magic website. These tools are actually quite sophisticated for a web app.

I don’t like how each piece of the result is a separate object in the EPS file that you can download. This does make editing in a vector program more difficult.

Results on Logos

I wanted to see how the program handled logos, since I imagine this might be very handy for those times when clients hand me a website .gif and expect me to use it in print!

There are a few extra steps for the logo option. Before the it is processed, you must choose if the image is highly compressed (note: this looks very similar to the photo option for the resolution of the vector image) and then you choose if the image has 12 or fewer colors (will produce more precise results) or “very many colors.” Then if you chose the 12 or fewer color options, it asks you to choose a color palette and gives you 12 sets of colors it picked up from the image.

The first result of the vectorized logo wasn’t all that impressive; I don’t remember the siren winking. For this, I used a 130 x 130 pixel image. I went into the edit mode and reconstructed some of the details. When editing a logo, you get a very bitmapped version of it to edit, so you might want to have a copy of it open in another window, preferably on another screen for reference. Essentially in the editor this logo was a three color .gif, so there were no transitional colors.

For the Starbucks logo, I fixed her face and a bit of the crown and text. Having worked with Photoshop and Illustrator and all the many wonderful shortcuts in those programs, I found the editing to be a little frustrating and inefficient, but it was pretty intuitive.

It was difficult to get the pixels correct when they could only be one of three colors in the editing portion of the program.

Results on Larger Logo Files

Next, I tried a larger logo, this time it was approximately 950 x 950 pixels, which would result in a 3 x 3 inch logo at 300 ppi. This turned out near perfect results. I was quite amazed.

The image on top (above) is the original file. The image below is the unedited Vector Magic result. You can see that it had a bit of trouble with some of the points, but I think that would be easily fixed in the edit mode.

Conclusion

Vector Magic is a quick and easy way to turn a photo into an illustration. I would say the final result probably shouldn’t be printed too large, because you would be able to discern all the individual shapes.

This could be a good alternative to redrawing a logo, depending on how complicated the logo is and the quality of the file you are given. The results on the Vector Magic samples page are extremely impressive, but those were probably done with larger files, like my last experiment.

Oh, and did you notice the Vector Magic title treatment? It’s Diavlo by Jos Buivenga! I love the design of Jos’ website. It’s really creative!

So what do you think? Impressed? Try it for yourself!

Technorati Tags: Design, Graphic Design, Vector, Vector Magic, Illustration