Convert an AP Document into a true Vector

[DeepDesertPhoto]

Hello.

I need some advice before I pick one of the listed programs.

I have been using Affinity Photo since 2016. It is an excellent program for developing photos, but it does have some limitations.
Sometimes I need to manipulate my photos in ways that cannot be done by AP without creating a softening effect, or other distortions.
I read that vector images don't have this problem so I recently purchased Affinity Designer in the hopes it will do certain work that cannot be done with AP.
However, I discovered that some of the vector related tools in AD simply don't work on rasterized images.
What I need is to convert an AP Document into a true vector so that the vector tools in Affinity Designer will work on it without creating the softening or distortions I encountered with AP.
One tool I needed in AD is the Fisheye Warp, but it won't work unless the image is a true vector.

So before I pick one of the programs in your list, which one of these is good for converting a raster image, such as an Affinity Photo Document, TIFF, or PNG, to a true vector so that I can then work on it with Designer?

I am currently using a MacBook Pro running Ventura.

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, DeepDesertPhoto said:

So before I pick one of the programs in your list, which one of these is good for converting a raster image, such as an Affinity Photo Document, TIFF, or PNG, to a true vector so that I can then work on it with Designer?

None of the vectorizers/tracers is really meant to give you a really good, or outstanding vector representation of high resolution camera bitmap images. Meaning no one of these tracers is initially meant to be a useful tool for developing high res photos as vectors. However, some of them can still do some fair job of vectorizing photo images as far as they can, as they have also their limitations in terms of color quantisation (...not detecting and handling an endless amount of possible image pixel colors and finer tonal color region shifts etc.). - Thus I would first at all try and test them out here for what you are after, before buying anything. I would start testing first out image vectorization with ...

• vectorizer.ai (online tool, free usage so far)
• Inkscape (free)
• Vector Magic (commercial)
• Supervectorizer Pro (commercial)

See also ...

... which might give you some ideas of what to expect here at best for photo images.

Or use instead other bitmap/pixel image toolings like in APh ...

... or via other third party image tools ...

• https://www3.lunapic.com/editor/?action=fisheye  *
• https://www.popphoto.com/gallery/how-give-ordinary-photo-fisheye-look/
• https://www.fotor.com/features/fish-eye-filter/
• ... and so on ...

 

[DeepDesertPhoto]

4 hours ago, v_kyr said:

None of the vectorizers/tracers is really meant to give you a really good, or outstanding vector representation of high resolution camera bitmap images. Meaning no one of these tracers is initially meant to be a useful tool for developing high res photos as vectors. However, some of them can still do some fair job of vectorizing photo images as far as they can, as they have also their limitations in terms of color quantisation (...not detecting and handling an endless amount of possible image pixel colors and finer tonal color region shifts etc.). - Thus I would first at all try and test them out here for what you are after, before buying anything. I would start testing first out image vectorization with ...

• vectorizer.ai (online tool, free usage so far)
• Inkscape (free)
• Vector Magic (commercial)
• Supervectorizer Pro (commercial)

See also ...

... which might give you some ideas of what to expect here at best for photo images.

Or use instead other bitmap/pixel image toolings like in APh ...

... or via other third party image tools ...

• https://www3.lunapic.com/editor/?action=fisheye  *
• https://www.popphoto.com/gallery/how-give-ordinary-photo-fisheye-look/
• https://www.fotor.com/features/fish-eye-filter/
• ... and so on ...

 

I tried to reply earlier, but for some reason it didn't get posted, so here goes again.

The primary reason I want to convert raster images, such as photos, to vectors, is so that I can scale, warp, and liquify them while preserving the details.
Some of the illustrations I create involve combining digital paintings with photographic components.

Here is an example of what I mean.
The following image is my current work in progress.
The girl was digitally painted using the paint and smudge tools in Affinity Photo. That was the easy part.
The hard part was when I tried to put clothing on her.
It is too difficult to paint the fine details in clothing from scratch, so I searched for photos of women in costumes to use as reference.
However, many of them were low resolution. When I tried to scale the reference photos to the same resolution of my digital painting a lot of fine details in the fabric was lost.
When I tried to warp, shear, and liquify the parts of the photos I needed to fit the body of the girl in my painting it got worse. The details almost became blurred.
It took a lot a work to manually correct this problem. Although the sample image I uploaded might look alright the clothing still does not have the original details I wanted.

I have read that vector formats are much easier to scale up than raster images and will preserve most if not all of the original details. That is why I was investigating the possibility of converting the reference photos to vectors in order to scale them up to the resolution I needed before editing them with the other tools in AP or Designer.
However, you mentioned that vector conversion programs have issues with complex colors and gradients.
I need to preserve the various shades of colors, so do you know if any of the programs you listed can preserve the original colors to at least the equivalent of 16 bit color depth?
I would like to find out as much as possible before downloading and playing around with programs I have never tried before.

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, DeepDesertPhoto said:

I need to preserve the various shades of colors, so do you know if any of the programs you listed can preserve the original colors to at least the equivalent of 16 bit color depth?

16 Bit color would be ~ 65,536 colors, so no chance for that in common vectorization/tracers which usually do support tracing in 32 - 256 colors and certain of them at best maybe a max of 512 different colors.

Here's how your above image would look initially traced in Vector Magic ...

(...where you then would need for the export to remove any white lines via blend mode antialising in ADe) ...

 

How it would be vectorized with VTracer via polygones or splines ....

 

... and how it would look vectorized in SuperVectorizer Pro (below) with max 64 colors ...

... so this should give you a good visual idea about what I said before about color quantisation. Further most tracers do not have specific features to convert bitmap gradients to gradient vector shapes (instead they do convert these to bands of constant colors).

[DeepDesertPhoto]

2 hours ago, v_kyr said:

16 Bit color would be ~ 65,536 colors, so no chance for that in common vectorization/tracers which usually do support tracing in 32 - 256 colors and certain of them at best maybe a max of 512 different colors.

Here's how your above image would look initially traced in Vector Magic ...

(...where you then would need for the export to remove any white lines via blend mode antialising in ADe) ...

 

How it would be vectorized with VTracer via polygones or splines ....

 

... and how it would look vectorized in SuperVectorizer Pro (below) with max 64 colors ...

... so this should give you a good visual idea about what I said before about color quantisation. Further most tracers do not have specific features to convert bitmap gradients to gradient vector shapes (instead they do convert these to bands of constant colors).

I can see what you mean.
This rendering is terrible. The original Affinity Photo document is in 32 bit HDR. The version I uploaded here was converted to 8 bit sRGB, and the vector tracer could not even preserve that.

I can use Affinity Photo, or Designer, to do the digital painting, but in order to do the warping or liquifying of the reference images I got off the internet I need to upscale them to the same resolution of my illustration so that the details are preserved.

It's clear that vector programs won't work.

Before I got Affinity Photo I used to use Photoshop CS5. It had a feature in which I could place a raster image into the canvas as a "smart object" which had properties similar to a vector yet preserved the colors of the original image. I was able to scale the smart object up and preserve most of the details.
Unfortunately CS5 was not compatible with newer versions of Mac OS. The Adobe technicians told me that they never tested CS5 above El Capitan. They suggested using Creative Cloud, but I told them I was not going to rent a program by the month.
That's when I found Affinity, and except for this particular problem with my illustration work, it works fine for developing photos.

Maybe Affinity will come up with something similar to what was used in Photoshop.

Until Affinity comes up with a solution, are there any programs you know of that can upscale images and preserve the original colors, and at least most of the details?

[loukash]

6 minutes ago, DeepDesertPhoto said:

Photoshop CS5. It had a feature in which I could place a raster image into the canvas as a "smart object" which had properties similar to a vector yet preserved the colors of the original image. […] Maybe Affinity will come up with something similar to what was used in Photoshop.

In Affinity, virtually every object is a "smart object" if you're comparing to PS CS5.

8 minutes ago, DeepDesertPhoto said:

Unfortunately CS5 was not compatible with newer versions of Mac OS. The Adobe technicians told me that they never tested CS5 above El Capitan.

In theory it may have worked up to Mojave, but I have never bothered to try because I stayed with El Capitan just until earlier this year (for many reasons). But PS had its issues already on El Capitan though, same as Illustrator CS5, while InDesign CS5.5 was relatively the most stable one of the CS5 bunch.

[ashf]

Smart Object is not just a "vector" technically, it's embedded/encapsulated objects precisely.
In Affinity, everything behave like Smart Object. (you can resize without quality loss, so called non-destructive.)
But Affinity also has "embedded document" which is encapsulated objects.  this is closer to Smart Object.

[DeepDesertPhoto]

1 minute ago, loukash said:

In Affinity, virtually every object is a "smart object" if you're comparing to PS CS5.

In theory it may have worked up to Mojave, but I have never bothered to try because I stayed with El Capitan just until earlier this year (for many reasons). But PS had its issues already on El Capitan though, same as Illustrator CS5, while InDesign CS5.5 was relatively the most stable one of the CS5 bunch.

The Affinity version of a smart object is apparently not the same as the CS5 version. When I tried scaling up some of the photos I got off the internet I would either get pixilation or detail softening. That's why I was hoping that a vector program would work. But no such luck.
The CS5 version of smart objects allowed me to scale an image up to 5 times its original size and still preserved at least 75% of the details.

Right now I am using a 2021 MacBook Pro running Ventura. So any Photoshop programs below Creative Cloud will not work.
I will have to wait and see if Affinity improves their version of smart objects to give them more vector properties while preserving the colors of the original image.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[loukash]

11 minutes ago, DeepDesertPhoto said:

The CS5 version of smart objects allowed me to scale an image up to 5 times its original size and still preserved at least 75% of the details.

But this has nothing to do with vectorization or tracing. You're posting in the wrong thread.

[DeepDesertPhoto]

9 minutes ago, ashf said:

Smart Object is not just a "vector" technically, it's embedded/encapsulated objects precisely.
In Affinity, everything behave like Smarts Object. (you can resize without quality loss, so called non-destructive.)
But Affinity also has "embedded document" which is encapsulated objects.  this is closer to Smart Object.

I understand what you're saying.
The problem I was having was with resolution conversion.
Some of the images I got off the internet were only 72 PPI. When I changed that to 300 PPI and then attempted to upscale to the pixel size I needed I would get pixelation on the sharp edges and detail softening in other areas.

I was able to solve some of this problem by resizing the image document using one of the Lanczos algorithms. That removed the pixelation, but the details were still lacking.

[DeepDesertPhoto]

5 minutes ago, loukash said:

But this has nothing to do with vectorization or tracing. You're posting in the wrong thread.

Before I came here I sent the Affinity Team an email posing these questions.
It was they who referring me to this thread since one of my questions had to to with converting a raster photo to vector format.

[ashf]

Actually what you need is not Smart Object.
Smart Object does not generate the detail of enlarged pictures.
What you need is an enlarger tool.

 

[DeepDesertPhoto]

52 minutes ago, ashf said:

Actually what you need is not Smart Object.
Smart Object does not generate the detail of enlarged pictures.
What you need is an enlarger tool.

 

Thanks for the suggestion.
I was thinking of giving Upscayl a shot since you had it on your list as being free, but when I went to the site it redirected me to the Apple App Store and the program now costs $12.99
I'm reluctant to pay for it without trying it first. It has only 2 reviews and one of those reviews is bad. The developer offered to help fix the problem that customer was having but there was no followup comment on whether the customer got the problem fixed or not.

When I first tried Affinity Photo it gave me a 14 day free trial period before requiring payment.

I think I will wait and see if Affinity comes up with some more tools for their programs.

[ashf]

45 minutes ago, DeepDesertPhoto said:

Thanks for the suggestion.
I was thinking of giving Upscayl a shot since you had it on your list as being free, but when I went to the site it redirected me to the Apple App Store and the program now costs $12.99
I'm reluctant to pay for it without trying it first. It has only 2 reviews and one of those reviews is bad. The developer offered to help fix the problem that customer was having but there was no followup comment on whether the customer got the problem fixed or not.

When I first tried Affinity Photo it gave me a 14 day free trial period before requiring payment.

I think I will wait and see if Affinity comes up with some more tools for their programs.

Download DMG.
You don't have to use AppStore.
Everybody using it for free thus there're only 2 reviews.

[DeepDesertPhoto]

40 minutes ago, ashf said:

Download DMG.
You don't have to use AppStore.
Everybody using it for free thus there're only 2 reviews.

I managed to download it this time by clicking the DMG link beneath the App Store link.
I thought they were both the same link so I didn't think to try them separately the first time.
I will install it tomorrow and give it a try.
If it works then one problem will be solved.

But there is still an issue I have with Affinity Designer.
There are some effects I wanted to do with some of my photos that cannot be done with AP. That is why I got Affinity Designer.
But when I tried to use the vector related tools in AD on my photos, such as the warp group, it would not work. That is why I contacted the Affinity Team.

They told me they were still working on vector conversion tools for raster images and didn't know when they would be ready. So I asked them about 3rd party conversion tools to convert my photos to vector so that I could then do the manipulations with Designer. That was when they referred me to this forum.

But since the 3rd party vectorizers cannot preserve the color gradients in the original photos I will have to wait until Affinity has something ready for me to try.

If the Upscayl program works I will let you know.
Have a nice evening.

[ashf]

5 minutes ago, DeepDesertPhoto said:

I managed to download it this time by clicking the DMG link beneath the App Store link.
I thought they were both the same link so I didn't think to try them separately the first time.
I will install it tomorrow and give it a try.
If it works then one problem will be solved.

But there is still an issue I have with Affinity Designer.
There are some effects I wanted to do with some of my photos that cannot be done with AP. That is why I got Affinity Designer.
But when I tried to use the vector related tools in AD on my photos, such as the warp group, it would not work. That is why I contacted the Affinity Team.

They told me they were still working on vector conversion tools for raster images and didn't know when they would be ready. So I asked them about 3rd party conversion tools to convert my photos to vector so that I could then do the manipulations with Designer. That was when they referred me to this forum.

But since the 3rd party vectorizers cannot preserve the color gradients in the original photos I will have to wait until Affinity has something ready for me to try.

If the Upscayl program works I will let you know.
Have a nice evening.

The Warp Group is for only vector objects.
For raster objects, use the Mesh Warp live filter in Photo.

[DeepDesertPhoto]

27 minutes ago, ashf said:

The Warp Group is for only vector objects.
For raster objects, use the Mesh Warp live filter in Photo.

I have used the warp mesh in AP. But it doesn't always work the way I want with certain images.
There are some instances where I needed to create some pretty unusual curvature effects in a photo, but when I used AP's warp mesh it would cause some softening of the photo.
When I watched the video tutorial about using the fisheye warp tool in Designer I thought that maybe that would enable me to create the effects I need without losing the details of the photo.
But it didn't work.
That is why I wanted to see if there was a way to convert a raster photo into a vector object.

Anyway, I will try out the Upscayl tomorrow to see if it can sharpen up some low resolution photos I have.

[v_kyr]

7 hours ago, DeepDesertPhoto said:

Before I came here I sent the Affinity Team an email posing these questions.
It was they who referring me to this thread since one of my questions had to to with converting a raster photo to vector format.

This is first of all mainly a resources thread, so more a list & overview for available vectrorization and vector tracing tools, as workaround tools for the missing vectorization feature in the Affinity suite. This place is usually not meant to be a place to discuss certain in detail work procedures etc., as other forum categories are better suited for such questions, like Affinity on Desktop Questions (macOS and Windows). - Since otherwise, this resources overview thread will be unnecessarily confusing filled with questions and answers, which are initially not the intent of this overview thread about vectorization and tracing tools!

[DeepDesertPhoto]

4 hours ago, v_kyr said:

This is first of all mainly a resources thread, so more a list & overview for available vectrorization and vector tracing tools, as workaround tools for the missing vectorization feature in the Affinity suite. This place is usually not meant to be a place to discuss certain in detail work procedures etc., as other forum categories are better suited for such questions, like Affinity on Desktop Questions (macOS and Windows). - Since otherwise, this resources overview thread will be unnecessarily confusing filled with questions and answers, which are initially not the intent of this overview thread about vectorization and tracing tools!

I sent Nathan at the Affinity Team an email explaining that this forum thread he originally referred me to did not provide all of the information I was looking for. He replied to my email and sent me a link to their official site Help Page that explains all of the tools and features in more detail.
I bookmarked that page so that I can refer back to it in the future.

Google does not always find what I am looking for.

But I will try that Upscayl program that ashf referred me to.
If it helps sharpen up the low resolution reference images I get off the internet for my work then at least I got something out of this discussion.

[DeepDesertPhoto]

11 hours ago, ashf said:

Download DMG.
You don't have to use AppStore.
Everybody using it for free thus there're only 2 reviews.

Good news.
I tried the program and it does work.
It wasn't perfect, but it should give me the details I need in low resolution images for my manipulation and illustration work.
I will go to the thread your list is on to post the results for those that might be curious.

[Leigh]

FYI: Have split this discussion from the following thread in Resources: 

 

 

[R C-R]

On 12/17/2023 at 10:27 AM, DeepDesertPhoto said:

Good news.
I tried the program and it does work.

For any Mac users like me still stubbornly using an older version of the macOS, note that upscayl for Mac requires macOS 11 or later.

[DeepDesertPhoto]

5 hours ago, R C-R said:

For any Mac users like me still stubbornly using an older version of the macOS, note that upscayl for Mac requires macOS 11 or later.

Fortunately, Upscayl works on mine, but I had to upgrade to Ventura because many of the business sites I deal with would no longer let me log in using High Sierra.
It got to the point where my bank kept warning me that my older version of Safari was no longer supported and would not let me login for security reasons.
That's just the nature of our current computerized society. The manufacturers push the latest gadgets and gizmos.
I only upgrade if I have to in order to do my work.