Bitmap to vector - best practices?

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  • hardhat

    Hey. I have a bunch of B&W Procreate sketches that I have to turn into vectors. I usually open in illustrator and do it from there, but my process is pretty clumsy and often looks quite a lot different from the original and takes an age to tweak. Anyone got any tips/tricks? Any better apps? Settings? Thx!

    The originals are these sorts of things:

  • hardhat0
    • Can't see imageNairn
    • I saw an image of a sad dog with no food in his bowl. Now, I want lunch.CyBrainX
    • I should have mentioned the sad, hungry dog was telling me that the link was broken.CyBrainX
  • Nairn3

    My process, because I do a lot of this too - upscale in Photoshop (perhaps blurring and tightening the levels, if it's That Sort of artwork) then stick in to Illy to Image Trace, where I immediately stick Paths up to about 95%+, Corners 90% and then if that's not looking 100%, I'll quickly flick the Noise up High to see what that does, and then perhaps try the threshold +/-20.

    I find that it's better to do as much of the work as possible pre-Image Trace, because anything thereafter tends to be manually tweaking strokes with the path tools.

    Sometimes it makes sense to do parallel conversions, using different settings, then amalgamating the 'correct' elements from both.

    • < fiddly as fuck, but it's the easiest way without having to redraw everythingIanbolton
    • Depending upon the resolution, sticking 'Paths' up high can sometimes promote artefacts thoughNairn
    • That sounds pretty good. I ended up starting to use a 3rd party program Vector Magic because I found Illustrator too clunky.PhanLo
    • Cool cool. I’ll give this a try.hardhat
    • +1 for this method. Image trace is one thing that has definitely improved over time in Illy.MrT
  • PhanLo0

    • Nice one. Will check when I’m back by a machinehardhat
  • Gnash2

    Lately I've been using a my Adobe Capture on my iPad to take sketches and turn them into vectors quickly. I just import the image into adobe capture and export as an SVG

    I took your pic and saved to my camera roll, imported into Capture then saved as SVG. I could have tweaked it in Captures setting, but i didn't. Just to show you raw output. took 2 secs

    here's the svg:
    https://we.tl/t-bbMrvjbqeI

    • Oh awesome. I can’t see the SVG on phone; but will check when I’m back laterhardhat
    • Oh wow. Managed to view it. Super awesome. Sounds like my kinda deal.hardhat
    • Adobe capture is available on iPhone, too. But have not tried itGnash
    • Need to use the ‘shapes’ tab for the imageGnash
    • Awesome. Heading back now so
      I know what I’ll be doing in half an hour
      hardhat
    • That seems a decent process too Gnash. I still remember the magic of running a drawing through Streamline back in the day. So many options now, :-)PhanLo
    • Oh ya, streamline! I ‘memberGnash
  • hardhat1

    Sorry. I posted and then got called away. It’s basically a pretty simple line art / crosshatch type deal. I’m stuck away from a computer til later now. Super helpful though. Thanks y’all