Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

moebis

Members
  • Posts

    9
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by moebis

  1. 33 minutes ago, jwst said:

    I don't have a problem using a separate vectorizer, such as the one in Inkscape.  It's a one-off conversion process, so it is not disruptive for me to do the vectorization and then import it into Affinity.  In these days of rapidly developing AI, and also the specialist nature of vectorizing I can see a valid reason for leaving that process to an external application.

    However ... when I saw the Vector Flood Fill tool announced for AD2.1 I did have hopes it would work like Inkscape's - in other words Vector Flood Fill even in bitmaps.  For certain cases the Inkscape vector fill is much better for achieving a good vector result than using the actual vectorizing function.

    So I am disappointed that the new Vector Flood Fill tool in AD2.1 doesn't fill bitmaps.

    Well, since the lack of a vectorizer doesn't impact you, and you really couldn't care if impact others, then why do you even care about a lacking flood fill tool in Affinity Designer? Just use Inkscape. You already stated it's not a problem to use another external application. And I don't mind using another tool to do flood fill, so my workflow should apply to you too. 🙄

  2. 48 minutes ago, LibOne said:

    I would like to see this tool too. Even in more basic form without the AI for now (which possibly be upgraded later).

    Of course AI would be a great feature but Im afraid its not possible in this conditions. Serif doesn't have the manpower of Adobe. But.. on the other side, implementing an AI would be a great strategy to jump the Affinity popularity. It has to be done sooner or later anyway (if we dont want the Affinity to stay behind all others in the near future). 

    Vector tracing has been done since the 16 bit days. It's not rocket science. Serif pretending like it would take an army to implement a feature that other packages have had for over 30 years is just bizarre. No line art tool is complete without a bitmap vector tracing tool. It should have been in version 1. The community was very vocal about it, they chose to ignore us, charge for a version 2 upgrade and give us vector flood fill? Are you kidding me?

  3. On 7/7/2015 at 12:57 PM, MEB said:

    @moebis, @dazzyweb,

    Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

    This was already discussed in several threads. We are considering to add a tracing tool to Affinity (eventually as a new persona) but it must be good enough to meet our  standards. This is not a trivial task/feature and may take some time until we get it as we want. Serif Drawplus codebase is totally different from Affinity's code. They are not compatible and the software requirements are also different. Affinity line of products are geared towards the professional market.

    For more information please check the following thread: JPEG, bitmap, tracing to covert to vector

    Have we figured out how to include bitmap tracing tools in Affinity Designer yet? It's been 8 years now.

  4. I can't believe we've paid for 2 versions of Affinity Designer over the last number of years, and here I see 2.1 out hoping they finally listened to the community and included a bitmap to vector tracing tool. Nope. A technology 30 years old and existing in CorelDRAW on Windows 3.1 is still missing from a modern graphics and design suite? Even the open source community has had many solutions for almost as long as Corel and Adobe. AI tools are now being released to vectorize bitmaps. How can you call this a line art, structured graphics design tool when we can't even access vectorizing tools? Bizarre. You realize half of logo design in the industry has been done like this in Illustrator for decades, and you want to compete? Speaking of AI, Adobe is embracing it, I don't see anything new or revolutionary from Serif. One of the reasons I switched off of Adobe and to Affinity Suite years ago was because I believes in this scrappy company and they would at least listen to us. Look at the 5+ years old threads where we were begging for vector tracing tools, and we simply ignored. We still paid to upgrade to 2.0, and now I see 2.1 with really nothing big.

  5. moebis,

     

    I have Super Vectorizer 2. It has all the problems I mentioned earlier -- arcane settings & sliders that give you very little idea of how much they will affect the accuracy of the output, zero documentation, a tendency to produce an excessive number of vectors with thousands of nodes to achieve reasonably good looking results, etc. I bought it on sale for substantially under $10 & I am not even sure it is worth that price.

     

    I have done a few experiments with simple B&W & greyscale drawings. After fiddling with the settings to get a good looking trace that retained all the important details of the image, which typically took as much as 20 minutes, I opened the output SVGs in Affinity Designer & hand tweaked each vector to remove unneeded nodes. It was not unusual for there to be dozens or hundreds of clusters of lots of sharp nodes that could be replaced with one or two smooth nodes that actually was a more faithful representation of the original raster art.

     

    This was tedious, time consuming work. It took over an hour just to clean up the most obvious areas, & several more to do a really thorough job. And in case anyone is wondering, yes, I also tried various ways of pre-processing the originals, like adding a small amount of blur, boosting contrast, or reducing the originals' pixel dimensions. This adding quite a bit more time to the experiments & in the end did not make much of a difference.

     

    The result of all this work was a reduction in file sizes from around 2X to as much as 5X, & better looking documents that were more faithful to the originals.

     

    But there were still problems in how the vectors were grouped & layered that made it very difficult to edit anything if say, I wanted to change the position of a cartoon figure's hand or change a facial expression or add another object. Fixing that was even more tedious & time consuming.

     

    To complete the experiment, I did manual tracings in AD, using the original raster images as templates. In almost every respect, even though I am not particularly fast at this sort of thing, the manually traced versions were better looking, far more editable, & took much less time to produce.

     

    So as far as I am concerned, adding something like this to AD would add almost no value to the product.

     

    Not all of us are perfectionists like you R C-R. Sometimes we need a quick and dirty method to scale a lo-res bitmap icon or something. I don't think there is a dispute here about this being a value add for a large portion of AD users. Just because you don't see any value doesn't mean there isn't any. There is a reason why this has been a staple feature in most vector art programs for the past 20 years. Unnecessary nodes? Yes, I know, I use Vector Magic, and although it's really good, it's not perfect, but I don't need perfect, I need a fast workflow. Thanks for your experience and feedback though. ;-) 

  6. Here is an almost 20 year old open source project: http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/index.html#intro

     

    There is also an app on the App Store called Super Vectorizer, that started out of a one man shop. This isn't tough. There are so many image processing libraries, I wouldn't be surprised to find out there is even example code for Xcode and swift to do this. My point is, even if it's basic B&W shape tracing, it would be a very welcome value add to any vector based drawing application. Affinity Designer should have this built-in as a core feature.

  7. @R C-R: Understood. However, I think the point we're all trying to make is that these techniques have been around for a very long time. CorelDRAW from 1994 running on Windows 3.1 could do tracing. There are small one man shops that offer vector tracing software on the App Store. With all the amazing things the Affinity devs have done in Photo and Designer, this should be a piece of cake for them. Maybe it's just a prioritization thing. If enough of us say "Please add this!" then it will find it's way into the software. For line art software, it's kinda a must really.

  8. What I find interesting is that Affinity Designer is trying to go head-to-head with Adobe Illustrator, and in so many ways its simply fantastic! However, and this is a big one, they obviously have in-house code to do vector tracing because Serif DrawPlus has it and they haven't figured out a way to incorporate it into Affinity Designer??? That's a shame, because you guys are getting so much good press, it's hard to convert people that are already entrenched in Illustrator, and you're just giving them more reasons not to take a second look. I would put this on your roadmap immediately and incorporate auto-trace ASAP. Just some friendly advice. Love your products!

    P.S. Another bit of unsolicited advice. Vector Magic is ancient, but good, really good. Maybe you guys can merge with them or license their technology. If you had the Vector Magic tracing engine inside Affinity Designer you would absolutely slaughter Adobe and Corel. Thats it, my two cents. ;-)

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.